Judge orders Hillary Clinton to testify in court for her email case

Hillary Clinton’s email controversy probably dealt her White House candidacy a fatal blow but the subject continues to hound her to this day. A judge just ordered the former Secretary of State to testify at a deposition in the lawsuit related to her use of a private server for her email communications.

“It is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton,” ordered Judge Royce Lamberth issued in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Hillary Clinton will be answering questions from lawyers of the Judicial Watch, a conservative advocacy group.

“As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business,” Judge Lamberth wrote.

While Judge Royce Lamberth's order authorized members of the Judicial Watch to question Clinton and others, the order also set limits to what kind of questions they can ask. “Any further discovery should focus on whether she used a private server to evade [the Freedom of Information Act] and, as a corollary to that, what she understood about State's records management obligations,” the judge wrote, according to CNN.

Judicial Watch requested the deposition of Clinton, her top aide Cheryl Mills and other former employees of the State Department in connection with a case seeking public access to her emails. While Judge Lamberth granted their request, they are barred from posing questions regarding the US government’s response to the 2012 Benghazi attack.

Judge Lamberth’s order also allows Judicial Watch to subpoena Google for Clinton’s email records. “The Court is not confident that State currently possesses every Clinton email recovered by the FBI; even years after the FBI investigation, the slow trickle of new emails has yet to be explained,” Lamberth’s order said. “For this reason, the Court believes the subpoena [to Google] would be worthwhile and may even uncover additional previously undisclosed emails.”

The State Department inspector general, the Congress, and the FBI already investigated Clinton's emails. However, Judge Lamberth believes that some questions remain unanswered.

“How did she arrive at her belief that her private server emails would be preserved by normal State Department processes for email retention?” he wrote.

No date has yet been set for Clinton’s deposition.