Tom Fitton's Judicial Watch Weekly Update

Tom Fitton's Judicial Watch Weekly Update | September 30, 2016

Weekly Update: Clinton Scandal Update

Clinton Scandal Update
The State Department Continues Dragging Its Feet
Court Rejects Claim of Racial Distinctions in the Natural Texture of Hair

Clinton Scandal Update

Hillary Clinton’s use of an email server in the basement of her home while she was secretary of state will leave a permanent stain on our system of justice and on the public’s trust in government.

This became abundantly clear during our “Clinton Scandal Update – Emails and the Clinton Foundation” symposium held here in Washington on September 29, 2016. The full video is available here – and is well worth watching and sharing.

Chris Farrell, our director of investigations, and I were joined by three distinguished experts: WND senior staff writer Jerome Corsi, author of Partners in Crime: The Clinton’s Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit; Peter Schweizer, author of the New York Times best-seller Clinton Cash; and Joseph E. diGenova, former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Peter Schweizer pointed out that the Clintons’ pay-for-play scandal sets “an extremely dangerous precedent. This is about more than the Clintons,” he said. “If it is not dealt with in a legal manner, it’s going to be imitated.” He also noted that this scandal dwarfs anything we have seen before in terms of efforts to hide what was occurring and in the sheer amount of money involved.

Chris Farrell spoke of the permanent damage done to the reputation of the FBI by Director James Comey’s negligence. “Mr. Comey is personally compromised,” he said. “The institution won’t get over it.” As you know, before joining Judicial Watch Chris worked in national intelligence. He pointed out that we know of at least 22 emails crossing Clinton’s unsecure server that contained “sensitive compartmented information,” a high level of classification. “This puts the United States at grave risk. Any first class intelligence organization would be looking for that kind of information.”

Jerome Corsi described how enormous sums of money that flowed into the Clinton Foundation cannot be accounted for. “Tens of millions of dollars were diverted,” he asserted. There is a discrepancy between what people gave the foundation and what it reported. “The Clintons ended up with net worths of 100 million dollars each.” And the speaking engagements don’t begin to account for it, he said.

Joe diGenova came down hard on FBI Director James Comey. “I do not believe Comey is fit to continue in office. His arrogance and obfuscation should disqualify anyone with the power the FBI has. He violated his oath. It is very clear that from the moment he took control of this investigation he decided he was not going to recommend prosecution. It was a political decision.”

I added that Congress has refused to take any kind of substantive action on the scandal. “Congress is refusing to take steps to hold Mrs. Clinton accountable. Why isn’t there a contempt citation pending now? Emails were destroyed after they were subpoenaed. Congressmen don’t want accountability to get in their way of retaining the Congress. I’m talking about the Republicans.”

I also noted that civil service employees stayed quiet even though they knew what was going on with Clinton’s non-state.gov email apparatus. “It’s a fundamental issue of government transparency,” I said. “We depend on the good faith of government when we file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. We rely on civil servants to do the job they’ve been entrusted to do. Hillary Clinton tore that compact up. If Mrs. Clinton gets away with it, if there’s no institutional accountability for her conduct, FOIA may end because you can’t rely on the law being enforced.”

This, as you can see, is no longer just about Bill and Hillary Clinton. It’s about the federal government generally, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the rule of law, national security, transparency and trust in government. Again, the full video of the blockbuster educational panel is available here.

The State Department Continues Dragging Its Feet

U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg has ordered the Department of State to begin processing at least 1,050 pages of Hillary Clinton emails recovered by the FBI and to provide Judicial Watch all non-exempt documents before November 4.

Here is what I said about the ruling in a public statement:

The State Department admitted that it has 5,600 Clinton emails recovered by the FBI that were government documents and not personal emails as she claimed. The public deserves to know what is in those emails, well before November 8, and the State Department should not continue dragging its feet on producing them. The State Department admitted in court today it pulled staff off of Clinton email Freedom of Information Act requests. The American people need to pressure State to stop sitting on these new Clinton emails for political reasons and release them as the law requires. It is outrageous the State Department has had these new Clinton emails since late July, but has only released 5 records.

The court ordered State to process the first 350 pages of documents by October 7, another 350 pages by October 21, and another by November 4. (The State Department claims a substantial number of the Clinton emails may be duplicative or near duplicative of emails Hillary Clinton previously turned over to the State Department.)

(The State Department confirmed that the FBI discovered 15,100 new Clinton emails as a result of Judicial Watch’s litigation seeking all of Mrs. Clinton’s work related emails (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00687)).)

There was more good transparency news because of litigation brought by Jason Leopold of Vice News. He separately negotiated with the Obama State Department to process a few thousand more pages of these new Clinton emails by Election Day. As Jason reports over at Vice News:

Hillary Clinton’s damn emails will continue to be a campaign issue leading right up into the presidential election.

Late Wednesday, the State Department agreed to post to its website by November 3 as many as 1,850 pages of emails that Clinton failed to turn over originally. The FBI recovered the emails during the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s email practices.

So Jason’s success brings the total of pages of email material to be processed up to nearly 3,000. Imagine if more media follow Jason Leopold’s and JW’s lead in pressing the case for all of Clinton’s emails! To be clear, just because an email is “processed” doesn’t mean it will be released, so the final total of releasable pages might be lower than 3,000.

I’ll be sure to brief you once we finally start getting the emails.

Court Rejects Claim of Racial Distinctions in the Natural Texture of Hair

Racial and radical insanity too often taints the rule of law under the Obama administration. It can be unnerving to see our federal government throw its massive power into issues. Witness this case of a hairstyle, as reported in our Corruption Chronicles blog. Thankfully the courts haven’t been completely compromised:

A federal appellate court has ruled against the Obama administration’s claims that firing a black woman for wearing dreadlocks constitutes racial discrimination, and the government agency representing the employee poses an interesting question: Would a woman wearing a hijab face the same fate? The answer is no. Muslims have more rights in the U.S. workplace than African Americans, it seems.

In the aftermath of several rulings protecting Muslim rights to wear religious head covers on the job, a black woman is being prohibited from sporting a hairstyle that is physiologically and culturally associated with people of African descent. That constitutes racial discrimination, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces the nation’s workplace discrimination laws.

The agency filed the case in 2013 on behalf of an Alabama woman, Chastity Jones, who was told by an insurance claims processing company to cut her dreadlocks—long clumps of ungroomed hair, symbolizing the mane of the Lion of Judah—as part of its grooming policy. The EEOC argued that the company, Catastrophe Management Solutions, committed racial discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In announcing the lawsuit, the agency’s regional attorney in Birmingham said the litigation didn’t seek to attack policies requiring employees to maintain hair in a professional, neat or conservative manner but rather focus “on the racial bias that may occur when specific hair constructs and styles are singled out for different treatment because they do not conform to normative standards for other races.” The EEOC’s district director pointed out that “generally, there are racial distinctions in the natural texture of black and non-black hair. The EEOC will not tolerate employment discrimination against African-American employees because they choose to wear and display the natural texture of their hair, manage and style their hair in a manner amenable to it, or manage and style their hair in a manner differently from non-blacks.”

A federal judge in Alabama didn’t buy the government’s seemingly far-fetched argument and in 2014 dismissed the race discrimination suit, finding that the company’s hairstyle policy did not violate federal anti-discrimination law. In his ruling the judge, Charles R. Butler, wrote that since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act only prohibits discrimination based on unchangeable characteristics, like sex and race, the company didn’t violate the law by banning the hairstyle. The Obama administration appealed and this month the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Alabama judge’s decision, rejecting Jones’s right to keep the dreadlocks. The appellate court found that Catastrophe Management Solutions has a “race-neutral grooming policy” and that hairstyles are not “immutable physical characteristics,” though the court acknowledged they could be “culturally associated with race.”

On the EEOC’s twitter account, which is embedded in the agency’s official website, an official comments on the Jones case: “I wonder if a woman who wore a hijab would have been asked to not wear that when coming to work?” The EEOC post was written by a black official named Michelle Adams, who also includes a clip from a 1990s television comedy sitcom because it reminds her of Jones’s “choice to fight” the dreadlock ban (the reality is that taxpayers funded the fight because a federal agency represented Jones). In the TV clip a black male employee tells white managers that his hair is not just for fashion. “It’s part of my heritage,” the actor says. “It’s a statement of pride.”

The question comparing dreadlocks to hijabs was rhetorical because the EEOC employee knows Muslims have a legal right to wear religious head covers at work thanks to litigation initiated by her agency. Judicial Watch has reported on some of the cases, including a 2013 federal court ruling that a Muslim woman’s civil rights were violated by an American clothing retailer that didn’t allow her to wear a hijab at work. As it has in other instances, the EEOC accused the retailer of religious discrimination under the Civil Rights Act and a federal judge agreed. In the ruling the judge wrote that the retailer acted with malice and reckless indifference by forcing the Muslim woman to remove her hijab, even though it had a company-wide policy prohibiting all types head cover.

The religious rights argument has also been used by the EEOC on behalf of dreadlocks. Over the summer the EEOC sued a private business for religious discrimination after it ordered a male employee to cut his dreadlocks. The man, a prep cook in central Florida, is Rastafari and the “Afrocentric” religion born in the slums of Jamaica requires followers to have long, matted and knotted hair.

Judicial Watch will monitor the outcome of the case, which was filed in July. There is no formal, organized leadership in Rastafarianism which makes it difficult to accept as an official religion protected by federal law. Rastafarians believe Haile Selassie, the former emperor of Ethiopia, is God and that he’ll help blacks living in exile as a result of the slave trade return to Africa. Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley, who died in Miami in 1981, was among the best known Rastafarians and more recently a famous rapper known as Snoop Dogg became Rastafari and changed his name to Snoop Lion, according to a mainstream news report. “A key belief for Rastas is the notion of death to all white and black oppressors,” the story says, adding that “the most common outward expressions of Rastafari are Rastas’ dreadlocks, penchant for smoking marijuana and vegetarian diets.”