JUDGE TELLS STATE DEPT: NO VACATIONS FOR YOU UNTIL YOU TURN OVER
CLINTON DOCS
A federal judge told
State Department officials to work through the weekend if they have to deliver
documents related to Hillary Clinton’s decision to award military
contracts to a defense manufacturer guilty of lying to government officials.
U.S. District Court
Judge Richard Leon told officials that even if it meant giving up weekends, State had to speed up
delivery of all memos and communications with British defense contractor BAE
Systems.
“Tell your colleagues
at the State Department … weekend trips to Nantucket should be off the table,”
Leon said to one of the federal lawyers in court Wednesday, according to the
Associate Press. “They should be rolling up their sleeves to get this done.”
The documents are
related to State’s decision to continue contracting with the U.S. subsidiary of
BAE Systems after the company pleaded guilty to misleading investigators
concerning compliance to regulations restricting foreign arms trafficking.
The Associated Press,
which filed the Freedom of Information Act suit in 2013, says it is important
to have the documents before the November election, as voters will decide
whether to elect Hillary Clinton as president.
“Many of those
elements relate directly to decisions that American voters are going to have to
make in this election,” Jay Brown, a lawyer for the AP said in court week. “At
least they potentially relate to that. We don’t have the documents.”
The State Department
missed a key deadline last week, saying they needed until October 17 to gather
the documents.
BAE, one of the
largest defense contractors in the world, allegedly committed 2,591 violations
of arms control regulations. They pleaded guilty in March 2010 to only one
count of conspiring to mislead the government regarding their compliance with
the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. According to the Justice Department, BAE
lied about a series of payments made to Saudi Arabian officials between 2000
and 2002.
After a $400 million
settlement with the Justice Department, BAE lobbied the State Department in
2011 and 2012 through the Podesta Group, a powerful D.C. firm with close ties
to the Clinton family. The State Department debarred the company from receiving
defense contracts, but at the same moment rescinded the debarment, the Wall
Street Journal reported at the time.
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