Discovery up until this point has brought to light a noteworthy amount of relevant information, but Judicial Watch requests an additional round of discovery, and understandably so. With each passing round of discovery, the Court is left with more questions than answers.

[T]here is still more to learn. Even though many important questions remain unanswered, the Justice Department inexplicably still takes the position that the court should close discovery and rule on dispositive motions. The Court is especially troubled by this. To argue that the Court now has enough information to determine whether State conducted an adequate search is preposterous, especially when considering State’s deficient representations regarding the existence of additional Clinton emails. Instead, the Court will authorize a new round of discovery …

The Court has considered the numerous times in which Secretary Clinton said she could not recall or remember certain details in her prior interrogatory answers. In a deposition, it is more likely that plaintiff’s counsel could use documents and other testimony to attempt to refresh her recollection. And so, to avoid the unsatisfying and inefficient outcome of multiple rounds of fruitless interrogatories and move this almost six-year-old case closer to its conclusion, Judicial Watch will be permitted to clarify and further explore Secretary Clinton's answers in person and immediately after she gives them. The Court agrees with Judicial Watch – it is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton.

State failed to fully explain the new emails’ origins when the Court directly questioned where they came from.

All text messages, encrypted app messages and instant messages involving official government business sent or received by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013.

All text messages, encrypted app messages and instant messages involving official government business sent or received by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013.

Nearly two decades after its well-documented transgressions culminated in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the federal law enforcement agency responsible for protecting the country against a repeat still struggles to do its job and it has cost dozens of American lives. The failures have allowed homegrown violent extremists (HVE) to carry out more than 20 attacks in the U.S. since 9/11, some of them after the agency, the FBI, closed counterterrorism investigations of the attackers.

The negligence has resulted in the death of 70 people murdered by at least six terrorists who had been under investigation by the FBI, according to a report issued recently by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General. In all the probes the FBI closed the cases quickly after ruling that the extremists presented no threat to national security. The agency examined its mishaps in the aftermath of the deadly events. “Following these attacks, the FBI conducted reviews and determined there were weaknesses in its HVE assessment processes,” the agency watchdog writes in its report. “However, we found that the FBI has not taken sufficient action to address these weaknesses.” There is more that may not have been included in the probe. The DOJ IG goes on to disclose that “in 2017, the FBI conducted an enterprise-wide review and identified potential terrorist threats that may not have been adequately assessed during calendar years (CY) 2014 through 2016, which amounted to 6 percent of the total assessments reviewed. We found that the FBI did not take adequate action on nearly 40 percent of these assessments for 18 months.”

The latest FBI transgressions resulted in some of the deadliest terrorist attacks since Islamic jihadists carried out their plots in 2001, killing thousands of innocent Americans. They include the 2009 massacre at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2016 mass shooting at an Orlando, Florida nightclub and the 2017 attack at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in south Florida. In 2011 the FBI opened a counterterrorism lead into Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator of the Fort Hood shooting, but the probe was closed five months later after agents evidently determined that Hasan did not pose a national security threat. Months later he massacred 13 people at a U.S. military post. The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was also under FBI investigation before he carried out his attack for making statements that displayed his radicalized ideology. Less than a year later the probe was closed after agents ruled the information to be unfounded. Mateen killed 46 people.

Boston Marathon terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev was also on the FBI’s radar before his attack, but the agency decided that he and his terrorist brother, Dzhokhar Tsarvaev, did not pose a threat to national security, according to the IG report. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother who was eventually killed in a wild shootout with police, was under investigation by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) after Russian authorities notified the agency that he had become radicalized. The Obama administration could have deported Tamerlan Tsarnaev years before he detonated bombs at a major sporting event over a criminal arrest, according to information uncovered by Judicial Watch shortly after the bombings that killed three and injured hundreds. The government also dropped the ball on Esteban Santiago, who killed five people in a 2017 attack at the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Weeks before the rampage, the FBI closed Santiago’s probe ruling that he did not pose a threat to national security.

It seems that little has changed since 9/11. After the attacks, the FBI got blasted for missing many opportunities to stop the hijackers and failing to uncover important intelligence about them. In fact, a DOJ IG report disclosed that the FBI missed at least five opportunities before the 2001 terrorist attacks to uncover crucial intelligence about the perpetrators. The watchdog specifically blamed the FBI for not knowing that two of the 9/11 hijackers lived in the U.S. and for failing to follow up on an agent’s theory that Osama bin Laden was sending students to American flight schools. A decade and a half later, a panel created by Congress to determine if the FBI had adopted post-9/11 recommendations found that the problems persisted. In a 2015 report the 9/11 Review Commission was critical of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force’s ability to detect terror plotters before they strike and found the agency’s computer hacking investigations were lacking.

Though federal law forbids it, every year the U.S. government squanders huge sums of American taxpayer dollars and dismisses it matter-of-factly as a “monetary loss.” In 2019, Uncle Sam misspent an eye-popping $175 billion, a 15% increase from the previous year and the figure is likely to grow in the future. The largest chunk—$121 billion or 69%—was blown on “improper payments” in three federal programs, according a federal audit issued this month by the nonpartisan investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The programs with the highest concentration of waste last year were Medicaid, Medicare and Earned Income Tax Credit.

“Improper payments—payments that should not have been made or that were made in incorrect amounts—continue to be an area of fiscal concern in the federal government,” the GAO report states. “Improper payments have been estimated to total almost $1.7 trillion government-wide from fiscal years 2003 through 2019.” The problem is so pervasive that Congress passed a law called Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act (IPERA) in 2010 to address the issue. Incredibly, many federal agencies don’t bother complying with the measure and the waste continues full throttle. In 2018 the government made $151 billion in improper payments, according to figures included in the GAO report. The government simply adds the numbers and reports it as “monetary loss, an amount that should not have been paid and in theory should or could be recovered,” according to congressional investigators.

There is no end in sight to the problem because around half of the federal agencies involved are noncompliant with IPERA, which requires agency heads to review and identify programs and activities that may be susceptible to significant improper payments. The law also demands that they publish and meet annual targets for improper payment reduction and accurately report in a timely manner all improper payments. Instead, Congressional investigators found that individual agency watchdogs discovered 21 programs were noncompliant with IPERA for each of the past three years, representing billions in improper payments. “The government’s ability to understand the full scope of its improper payments is hindered by incomplete, unreliable, or understated estimates; risk assessments that may not accurately assess the risk of improper payment; and noncompliance with criteria listed in IPERA,” the GAO writes.

Let’s examine the incredible figures considered by investigators last fiscal year. Remember, these are agencies that are reporting waste but not all are complying, so we really have no idea how much of our money the government is recklessly blowing. Medicaid, which provides around 65.7 million poor people nationwide with free medical care, doled out a whopping $57.4 billion in improper payments last year. Medicare, the government health insurance program for retired people made $46.2 billion in improper payments, the GAO found. The Earned Income Tax Credit, an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) benefit for low-income workers distributed $17.4 billion in erroneous payments last year. The Earned Income Tax Credit has long been plagued by fraud and corruption that has resulted in the loss of tens of billions of dollars. The program is rife with improper applications and fraudulent claims, according to one report that cites IRS figures showing more than 60% of overpayments are due to “manipulation of self-employed income and expenses, unqualified dependents being claimed, and misuse of single and head of household filing status.”

The GAO writes that most of the government’s improper payment estimates are related to three root causes that, frankly, most Americans may find difficult to believe. The first is insufficient documentation to determine payment accuracy. About $74.1 billion in improper payments resulted from situations where the agency lacked supporting documentation necessary to verify the accuracy of the payments. The second is administrative or process error. About $39.1 billion resulted from incorrect data entry, classifying, or processing of applications or payments. The third is the inability to authenticate eligibility. About $38 billion resulted from the agency not being able to authenticate eligibility criteria, the GAO found.