State Department seeks to limit questions in Clinton email case

Lawyers for the US State Department ask a federal judge to limit the scope of testimony about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account as secretary of state.

The government filed its response late Tuesday in a public records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal advocacy group.

Federal District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan last month granted the group “limited discovery” into why the Democratic presidential front-runner used an email server at her New York home while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.

Judicial Watch wants to question eight current and former department staffers under oath, including top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.

In its response, the government asks the judge to strictly limit the questions that can be asked to those involving the 2009 creation of Clinton’s private email system. Topics the government asked Sullivan to forbid include the “employment status of a single employee; the storage, handling, transmission, or protection of classified information, including cybersecurity issues; and questions about any pending investigations.”

The FBI is investigating whether sensitive information that flowed through Clinton’s email server was mishandled. The inspectors general at the State Department and for US intelligence agencies are separately investigating whether rules or laws were broken.

— AP