Category Archives: Hillary Clinton email

Obama Admin uses Corrupt Brookings Inst. as Foreign Lobby

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There is some questionable history of the Brookings Institute:

Brookings had a cameo role in the Watergate saga. President Nixon reportedly told aides to rifle through the office of Brookings fellow Leslie Gelb, who had been a Department of Defense analyst with Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times and the Washington Post. One version of events says the break-in was foiled when a Brookings security guard, Roderick Warrick, stopped two men with attaché cases who were trying to sneak into the building on a summer evening in 1971. Additionally, the President of Brookings and a board member is Strobe Talbott. 

Stobe has an interesting history that includes Russian spies, a long friendship with the Clintons and…. Bill Clinton and Strobe Talbott;
 The former president lived with the former deputy secretary of state and journalist when Clinton was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University.

talbott clinton

Disclosure: Brookings Takes Millions from Foreign Governments
Documents reveal contributions from Qatar, UAE

FreeBeacon, Adam Kredo: The Brookings Institution, one of the country’s top left-leaning think tanks, has for the first time admitted to Congress that it receives millions of dollars every year from foreign governments, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, according to official disclosure forms obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The disclosure of these figures comes as a result of a recently implemented federal law mandating that those who testify before Congress reveal any potential conflicts created as a result of funding by foreign entities.

Brookings has come under intense scrutiny by reporters and others for not fully disclosing the large amounts of cash it receives from Middle Eastern governments.

The practice has led some to accuse Brookings and its most prominent scholars of pushing biased analyses aimed at making these foreign governments look good. The think tank’s relationship with Qatar has received particular attention due to the Middle Eastern country’s close relationship with the terrorist group Hamas and its ongoing funding of various terrorist entities.

The disclosure form, which is presented to Congress before an individual testifies, reveals that Brookings received nearly $15 million from the Embassy of Qatar between 2013 and 2015. Brookings also maintains a facility in the Qatari capital of Doha, where Hamas is known to operate freely.

The think tank received another $1,920,000 from the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates between those same years.

Several million dollars also have been donated over those years by the Norwegian and Swedish governments. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) also donated more than $250,000 to Brookings.

These disclosures came as a result of a Sept. 17 congressional hearing at which Suzanne Maloney, a Brookings senior fellow, offered testimony on Iran’s relationship with the terrorist group Hezbollah.

The forms further reveal that, in addition to the millions in foreign donations, Brookings has received federal grants.

Both the foreign donations and federal grants “were for independent research and analysis related to an number of subject matters,” according to Maloney. A “portion” of these funds may have been “related to the hearing,” which discussed the ways in which Hezbollah stands to profit from Iran in the wake of the recent nuclear deal.

When questioned about the foreign donations by the New York Times last year, Martin Indyk, a Brookings scholar who has also worked with the Obama administration, defended the practice and maintained that it does not bias his views.

“Our business is to influence policy with scholarly, independent research, based on objective criteria, and to be policy-relevant, we need to engage policy makers,” said Indyk, who reportedly received a $14.8 million check from Qatar.

Many experts have refuted Indyk’s claim and accused Brookings and Indyk of ignoring a clear conflict of interest.

“When an American think tank like Brookings accepts money from Middle Eastern regimes that sharply restrict free speech, it is saying it doesn’t care that its scholarship on the Middle East might at least appear to be compromised,” said Lee Smith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who has reported on Brookings’ funding. “It is saying it doesn’t care that there is at least the appearance if not the reality of a very obvious conflict of interest.”

This appearance of a conflict became acute when Indyk was selected by the Obama administration to mediate peace between Israel and the Palestinians, Smith said.

“The problem was further compounded when the Obama White House named Martin Indyk to serve as envoy to a peace process between two actors, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, that are both at war with Hamas—a terrorist organization that, like Brookings, is funded by Qatar,” Smith said. “That neither Indyk nor Brookings nor the White House ever saw this as a conflict of interest is evidence of an arrogance beyond compare.”

Josh Block, CEO of the Israel Project, said the new disclosure rules are necessary for transparency.

“The reason we supported this rule change is because the American people deserve to know what foreign governments are paying to influence U.S. policy by funding these ‘independent experts’ to the tune of millions of dollars—especially countries like Russia or Qatar with  long, sordid records of mischief or supporting terrorism against Americans and our allies and of rank hostility toward Israel,” Block said.

“Until now, the potential foreign financial conflicts of interests and the motives of those funding the experts testifying was totally hidden from view,” Block said. “This kind of transparency is good governance. We applaud those in Congress who adopted this rule for matters of foreign affairs and national security and would like to see its expanded use in other committees in both the House and Senate.”

Brookings did not respond to a request for comment on its foreign funding.

October 6 & 22, Benghazi Cmte, Popcorn Buttered?

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More emails surface in Hillary Clinton Benghazi probe

Politico: More previously-undisclosed State Department emails related to Benghazi have surfaced in a federal court filing, offering a public accounting of at least some of the records still being sought by congressional investigators.

The filing Monday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Citizens United describes about a dozen Benghazi-related emails that were withheld in whole or in part as State responded to one of the group’s requests seeking information about contacts between a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and officials with the Clinton Foundation.
Most of the documents also appear to have been withheld from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating State’s response to the attack. The committee is scheduled to take public testimony from Clinton on Oct. 22.

A panel spokesman said he could not immediately confirm which of the documents had been turned over to the committee, but Citizens United President David Bossie told reporters staffers at the House panel told the group State never produced the records to Congress.

“To the best of their knowledge, the do not have these documents either, even though they are under subpoena for an extended period of time,” Bossie told reporters outside U.S. District Court in Washington after a hearing on the suit.

State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach told POLITICO there is no effort to impede congressional probes.

“The Department has made every effort to cooperate with the Benghazi Committee, providing 32 witnesses for interviews and over 70,000 pages of documents, including over 20,000 pages in the last month alone,” Gerlach said. “We will continue to respond to the Benghazi Committee’s requests, but as they mount and modify over time, so too must we plan accordingly for the time and resources they consume.”

In the new court filing, State Department official John Hackett said nearly all the Benghazi-related emails involved in the FOIA lawsuit involve deliberations among State officials about how to respond to Benghazi-related congressional inquiries.

In several high profile cases, including the ill-fated Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation, the Obama Administration has defended its right to keep confidential its internal discussions about House and Senate investigations. The administration has also sought to extend that confidentiality to cover responses to media inquiries prompted by congressional probes.

In June, while producing records to congressional committees, the State Department confirmed it was holding back some Benghazi documents.

“A small number of documents implicate important Executive Branch institutional interests and are therefore not included in this production,” Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affiairs Anna Frifield wrote in a letter to the House Benghazi panel.

However, House staffers said the diplomatic agency has repeatedly rebuffed requests for a log of documents State is withholding. The FOIA lawsuits provide a vehicle to force the agency to identify those emails, although the substance of the messages is not disclosed.

At the court hearing Tuesday, a federal judge pressed the State Department to move more quickly to process documents requested by Citizens United and others who have been demanding records relating to Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state .

“I think there has to be some reallocation of resources, because these are atypical cases,” U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said. “This case is important to the public. The public is clamoring for information. Everyone is clamoring for information.”

After Sullivan derided State’s approach as “business as usual,” Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Shapiro insisted that State’s 63.5-member FOIA processing staff has been working long hours and weekends in “demoralizing” conditions to publish emails from Clinton’s account as well as records sought in about 100 pending FOIA lawsuits and thousands of pending FOIA requests.
“I just want to assure the court that it’s not business as usual,” Shapiro declared. “The State Department’s being crushed by obligations.”

Much of the hearing was spent discussing why the State Department failed to complete searches of emails provided by former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin by a court-ordered deadline of September 13.

Sullivan seemed to waver on how culpable State was for delays, sometimes suggesting that the agency had to wait for the cooperation of its former employees and at other points suggesting that State was being sluggish.

The judge initially attributed the delay to “foot-dragging” by Mills and Abedin in response to requests from their former agency. However, he quickly withdrew that accusation.
“So, there was foot-dragging on their part–well, there was delay. I can’t say there was foot-dragging,” Sullivan said.

Justice Department attorney Caroline Anderson insisted that the State Department was only obliged to produce records in its possession at the time the search began, so records turned over later by Mills and Abedin were not technically covered by the FOIA requests filed last year for records of contacts between top Clinton aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a private consulting firm with connections to former President Bill Clinton.

“The State Department is in compliance with every order of this court,” Anderson said.

Anderson proposed that State have until December 9 to locate and process relevant records from Mills’ and Abedin’s accounts, but eventually said it was just “the State Department’s hope” to get it done by then. That seemed to irritate Sullivan.

“How long does it take you to run a computer search?” the judge asked. “Someone pushes a button. I’m not minimizing it, but it’s a computer search.”

Citizens United attorney Matthew McGill insisted that State knew or should have known weeks ago if it was going to have trouble meeting the deadline. “They should have come to the court then….Instead, they waited,” McGill said. “That was a tactical decision on their part. It was meant to delay.”

Anderson asked that State have a month to finish the computer-based searches and then more time to review the content of the documents for sensitive national security information and other details subject to withholding. But the judge said a shorter timeline was necessary.

Sullivan ordered State to finish the searches by October 2 and set a hearing four days later.

Bossie said State’s sluggish response was part and parcel of an effort to benefit Clinton’s Democratic presidential bid by kicking the issue down the road.

“Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills have taken the specific strategy and tactics just like they did in the 90s–the same people the same strategies–to drag these efforts out, to drag out congressional committees, to frustrate justice and to frustrate the American people from getting information so that people ask questions like: ‘This has been going on for three years and don’t we know everything and isn’t this a rehash?” the conservative activist said. “That is their deliberate strategy. They’ve been doing this for 20 years…..the same Clinton playbook is played over and over and over again.”

Clinton campaign spokesmen and attorneys for Abedin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mills’s lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, called Bossie’s claim of deliberate delay “untrue.”

 

 

 

 

 

Hey Vegas, Seen this Clintonista at a Casino Lately?

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Primer:

Charlie Trie’s and Ng Lap Seng’s Laundered Contributions to the DNC Introduction
Former Little Rock, Arkansas, restaurateur Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie and Macau-based businessman Ng Lap Seng collaborated in a scheme to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign funds to the DNC. Ng wired over one million dollars from accounts he maintains in Macau and Hong Kong to accounts maintained by or accessible to Trie in Little Rock and Washington, D.C. Although Trie held himself out as an international trader (and, in fact, actively sought to develop an international trading business he called Daihatsu International Trading Corporation), he was never successful. Trie’s bank records and tax returns reveal that he received little or no income from sources other than Ng Lap Seng.
Although he failed to establish a successful, income-generating international trading business, Trie, his wife and his businesses managed to contribute a total of $220,000 to the DNC between 1994 and 1996. Trie and Ng also reimbursed the contributions made by a number of other DNC contributors who were recruited by Trie in order to further disguise the ultimate source of the contributions. As Trie earned little money through his own business activities, the Committee concludes that Trie used the foreign-source funds wired from Ng to make his (and his wife’s and businesses’) DNC contributions and to reimburse the conduit contributors. The Justice Department indicted Trie for these illegal activities on January 28, 1998. More here.

Over this past weekend:

Chinese Businessman Arrested For Sneaking $4.5M in Cash into US

Previously accused of illegally funneling money to DNC in ’Donorgate’

FreeBeacon: A Chinese businessman accused of illegally funneling foreign money to the Democratic National Committee ahead of Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996 has been arrested for sneaking upwards of $4.5 million into the United States.

The New York Post reported that 68-year-old Ng Lap Seng, a real estate developer, and interpreter Jeff Yin were arrested Saturday for smuggling millions in cash from China to U.S. airports over two years, Manhattan federal court records indicate.

Ng smuggled the total of more than $4.5 million in cash into the U.S. over roughly 10 trips between China and the states between 2013 and 2015, according to the criminal complaint.

The businessman and his interpreter were scooped up by authorities after they told Customs and Border Patrol that the $400,000 in cash they had on hand was for gambling and purchasing paintings and then brought the money to Queens, N.Y.

It is unclear what has happened to the rest of the money.

Though never ultimately charged, Ng played a role in the “Donorgate” scandal before the 1996 elections that resulted in Clinton ally Charlie Trie pleading guilty to violating campaign finance laws in 1999.

Ng transferred approximately $1.4 million to Trie, also a Chinese businessman, who then gave the funds to the DNC before Bill Clinton’s reelection.

Documents: Iran Harbored al Qaeda

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So, if we know this, imagine what Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and the Democrats in Congress know that they would approve a nuclear deal with Iran much less trust them? ‘Death to America’ then and now is real.

Bin Laden’s secret documents reveal Iran-Qaeda ties

Documents belonging to Osama bin Laden, the former leader of Al-Qaeda, obtained by Alsharq Alawsat newspaper, reveal a “close relationship” between Iran and Al-Qaeda’s commanders and high ranking members, which began in the era of the nineties the paper has reported.

The documents, confiscated by U.S. forces after killing Bin Laden in 2011 in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, show Al-Qaeda was moving comfortably inside Iran, and indicate that the organization, at some point, planned to establish an office in Tehran in 2006. But it receded and rejected the idea because of the excessively high costs.

According to the documents, the Iran dealing with the organization dates back to the period of the nineties, during the presence of the leaders of Al-Qaida in Sudan, due to the consolidation of the then Iran-Sudan ties.

The U.S. counter-terrorism expert Paul Krishnak told Alsharq Alawsat that U.S Treasury freeze of six leaders of the organization present in Iran “confirms that Tehran was an important link in financing the network’s branchs in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

In addition, the documents show that despite the relations with Iran, Bin Laden, who was dealing cautiously with Tehran, warned his followers that the Iranian “might play a role” in selling them.

***

PanARMENIAN.Net – The government of Iran released five senior members of Al Qaeda earlier this year, including the man who stepped in to serve as the terrorist group’s interim leader immediately after Osama bin Laden’s death, and who is the subject of a $5 million bounty, according to an American official who had been briefed on the matter, the New York Times reports.

Iran’s release of the five men was part of a prisoner swap in March with Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, the group holding an Iranian diplomat, Nour Ahmad Nikbakht. Nikbakht was kidnapped in the Yemeni capital of Sana in July 2013.

The Iranian government, in a statement on Thursday, September 17, after the release was reported by Sky News earlier this week, denied that the five men had been freed. The American official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter, confirmed the release of Saif al-Adl, a senior member of Al Qaeda’s ruling body, known as the Shura Council, who oversaw the organization immediately after bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs in Pakistan in 2011.

Of special concern is the release of Mr. Adl, a former colonel in the Egyptian military believed to be in his 50s, who is listed on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, and who was indicted in the 1998 United States Embassy bombings in East Africa. Qaeda operatives have described him as the organization’s operational boss. ***

It is not known when the men were apprehended by Iran.

Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who served as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency before retiring, said Adel’s release will serve as “a shot of energy” in the leadership branch of al Qaeda.

“The collusion between al Qaeda and Iran is something we have seen before and this trade, if known by the U.S., should have been included as part of the Iran deal negotiations,” Flynn said.

***

There is more as in December of 2011, a U.S. District Court ruled that Iran had deep ties and collusion with al Qaeda beginning in the mid 1990’s based in Sudan. What is more forgotten is the chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report stating the same in full detail.

Iran – Al Qaeda links are not new. Ties between the two were initiated in the early 1990’s when Hasan Al-Turabi, the leader of Sudan’s National Islamic Front, began to encourage Sunni-Shia reconciliation in order to defeat the common enemy, namely America and its allies. According to the U.S. court record for the 1998 U.S embassy bombings, Osama was living in Khartoum when the Sudanese religious scholar Ahmed Abdel Rahman Hamadabi brought Sheikh Nomani, representing the Iranian Shias, to meet the Al Qaeda leadership. Sheikh Nomani “had access to the highest echelons of power in Tehran.”

As a result of this meeting, “Iran and Al Qaeda reached an informal agreement to cooperate, with Iran providing critical explosives, intelligence, and security training to bin Laden’s organization.” This meeting was the first in a series of meetings between Iran and Al Qaeda.

The 9/11 Commission Report has a section devoted exclusively towards investigating Iranian ties to Al Qaeda entitled, “Assistance from Hezbollah and Iran to Al Qaeda.” The report states that shortly after these meetings in Sudan in late 1991 or 1992, “senior Al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security. Bin Laden reportedly showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983. The relationship between Al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations.”

 

FBI Declines Cooperation with State Dept. Hillary Server

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Update: More data released via Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch today released more than 50 pages of new emails from the clintonemail.com server account of Huma Abedin, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton during her tenure in the State Department. The emails discuss seemingly sensitive security and foreign affairs issues and raise questions about the handling of classified material during Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department.  The documents were obtained as result of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking Huma Abedin’s government business emails conducted on non-state.gov email accounts (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)).  The emails were produced from a search of State Department records, as the agency continues to delay full production of records turned over by Ms. Abedin recently.

In 2012, then-Secretary of State Clinton traveled to Finland (June 27-28), Latvia (June 28), Russia (June 28-29), and Switzerland (June 29-30).  On June 26, 2012, former Principal Deputy Executive Secretary Pamela Quanrud, writes to Abedin:

Huma – if I could lobby to get to Geneva on Friday night. We have a big data dump to get from beth jones and others there to prep for Saturday, and it would be a lot better for us to work through the night there (with access to classified) than be stuck in St. Pete with no classified at all.

Abedin responds from her [email protected] account the next morning (June 27):

i had no idea about no comms

of course

we need secure

makes total sense

The emails show Abedin used the non-secure clintonemail.com server to discuss sensitive travel and operations security information that could have placed the personal security of Clinton and other government officials at risk, such as real-time location information while traveling abroad, and other hotel and travel arrangements.

On May 31, 2012, as Clinton and her State Department entourage are traveling in Scandinavia, Abedin writes to Clinton’s then-Special Assistant Lona J. Valmoro:

Abedin to Valmoro: “Let me know when u r leaving.”

Valmoro: “We are en route to airport now. Could we do during the 45 minute drive from Oslo airport to hotel.  Everyone can dial into Ops and will have minis.”

Abedin: “When? Who’s in car with her?”

Valmoro: “Cheryl is with her now. If we are wheels up by 9:35 pm, land at 11:25, start call by 11:35 or 5:35 pm EDT?

Abedin: “[I] could barely hear [Hillary Clinton] with the background….”

On June 25, 2012, Abedin writes that she is willing to discuss travel details while on a “packed train.” With the subject line “Could we get on the phone together at 11:30 – in advance of the [Russia] trip call?” Abedin writes to several people, including Quanrud:

I see call got moved to noon. We can talk right before then if you want. All shuttles were canceled this morning and I am sitting on a packed train so hard for me to talk but we can def do calls. [Emphasis added]

Other emails also provide details of Clinton’s plans and schedules for the 2012 trip that included Russia, including the timing of calls on trip planning.

The documents show that State Department officials sent duplicate emails about government business to Abedin’s official State Department address and her clintonemail.com account.

Other emails show sensitive foreign affairs information is contained on Abedin’s Clinton server account.  A June29, 2012, email discloses a move to hold a meeting concerning Syria in Geneva.  Pamela Quanrud writes Abedin and Clinton aide Valmoro an email with the subject:  “UK and P3 meeting requests”:

UK has asked to meet at 8:45 ahead of a 9:30 with UK.US and France to coordinate. Jake thought P3 meeting necessary – what about UK? Should we say yes to 8:45?

Abedin writes back two hours later:

UK meaning hague?

Another email details a request from the Iraqi Foreign Minister for a bilateral discussion with Clinton.  Abedin uses her clintonemail.com account to approve the “pull aside,” writing, “fine to add to list.”

Another document shows Abedin approving, weeks ahead of time, the Hanoi Sheraton for Clinton’s trip on July 10-11, 2013, to Vietnam.  A June 22, 2012, email from Tulinabo S. Mushingi, who is now the U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso, details the hotel options in Hanoi for Abedin, with Sheraton as the number one option.  The email details both the luxury and security aspects of the hotel:

The Sheraton hosted the Secretary in July 2010 and October 2010 and much of the hotel staff remains, so they know the drill The July 2010 visit S stayed in the Imperial Suite (shown in attachment and the suite available for this visit); in October 2010, since another Head of State was also in the Sheraton and occupied the Imperial Suite S stayed in the Presidential Suite. The Imperial suite is spacious and very bright and airy, with lake views. It has a large bathroom with Jacuzzi style tub and walk in shower. The Sheraton was redecorated and refurbished within the past 12 months, so it is in excellent condition and is very attractive. From a logistics perspective the hotel is excellent as it has a very large parking area for staging motorcades. It’s location is in close proximity to government buildings where most meetings are likely to be held.

***

P.S. Post reminded us that the entire focus of the Hanoi stop is to promote U.S. businesses and trade. Given the purpose of the stop, the optics of staying at the available quality American name brand hotels would carry the same message, hence another for choosing The Sheraton.

Mushingi also suggests that one other hotel choice is not up to par in that “the suite bathroom is nice, but not quite to the standard of the Sheraton.”

Again, Abedin receives and responds to this email on her non-government account, writing back the next day:

Sheraton worked perfectly fine.

On August 8, in response to a FOIA lawsuit, Judicial Watch obtained a sworn declaration from the former secretary of state in which she claimed to have turned over to the agency “all my e-mails on clintonemail.com” and conceded that “Huma Abedin did have such an account which was used at times for government business.”  Neither the State Department, Clinton, nor Abedin has provided information about the status of Abedin’s emails (or the emails of any other government employee) on the clintonemail.com server.

“These emails Judicial Watch forced out through a federal lawsuit show that Huma Abedin used her separate clintonemail.com account to conduct the most sensitive government business, endangering not only her safety but the safety of Hillary Clinton and countless others,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “And why would Ms. Abedin and Mrs. Clinton use this unsecure system to discuss foreign affairs and sensitive matters such as the Syria conflict?  Hillary Clinton’s email games were a danger to the nation’s security.”

The FBI is probing Hillary Clinton’s personal email and data server but will not provide any progress report or findings to the Department of Justice or the State Department. Further, the FBI refuses to even reveal to the State Department exactly what the FBI technology team is researching. The judge has forced the State Department to cooperate with the FBI but it is clearly not a two way street.

One particular area of concern for the FBI team is to determine the evidence of hacking which could in fact be used to build on existing foreign hacking investigations. For the FBI to determine digital traces of foreign intelligence services and even more the likelihood of damage assessments is tantamount to the FBI investigation in the realm of cyber-espionage. The FBI is owning this process exclusively and not collaborating with the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, at least at this time.

 

FBI refuses to cooperate in Hillary Clinton email server probe

WashingtonTimes: The FBI refused to cooperate Monday with a court-ordered inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email server, telling the State Department that they won’t even confirm they are investigating the matter themselves, much less willing to tell the rest of the government what’s going on.

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan had ordered the State Department to talk with the FBI and see what sort of information could be recovered from Mrs. Clinton’s email server, which her lawyer has said she turned over to the Justice Department over the summer.

The FBI’s refusal, however, leaves things muddled. “At this time, consistent with long-standing Department of Justice and FBI policy, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation, nor are we in a position to provide additional information at this time,” FBI General Counsel James A. Baker wrote in a letter dated Monday — a week after the deadline the Justice Department had set for the FBI to reply.

Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that is pursuing at least 16 open-records cases seeking emails from Mrs. Clinton and her top aides, said at this point it’s not even clear what Mrs. Clinton provided, since all that’s been made public at this point are the former secretary of state’s public comments and some assertions, made through her lawyer, to the State Department.

Judicial Watch is prodding the courts to try to delve more deeply into Mrs. Clinton’s emails, and the group said a number of questions persevere about both Mrs. Clinton and top aides such as Huma Abedin, who did public business on an account tied to the server Mrs. Clinton maintained.

“We still do not know whether the FBI – or any other government agency for that matter – has possession of the email server that was used by Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abedin to conduct official government business during their four years of employment at the State Department,” Judicial Watch said.

“We also do not know whether the server purportedly in the possession of the FBI – an assumption based on unsworn statements by third parties – is the actual email server that was used by Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abedin to conduct official government business during their four years of employment at the State Department or whether it is a copy of such an email server. Nor do we know whether any copies of the email server or copies of the records from the email server exist,” the group said in its own court filingMonday afternoon.

Judicial Watch did release more than 50 pages Monday of emails it obtained from Ms. Abedin’s account on Mrs. Clinton’s server, and said it was clear she was talking about “sensitive” topics that shouldn’t have been discussed on an insecure account.

Many of those were details of Mrs. Clinton’s movements overseas, such as hotels she was staying at.

“These emails Judicial Watch forced out through a federal lawsuit show that Huma Abedin used her separate clintonemail.com account to conduct the most sensitive government business, endangering not only her safety but the safety of Hillary Clinton and countless others,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

He questioned what reason Ms. Abedin — who did maintain an account, [email protected], on State.gov servers — would have for using the other account for important business. Mrs. Clinton said she kept only one account, the one on the clintonemail.com server, because it was more convenient, but that reasoning does not appear to apply to Ms. Abedin.

The State Department is making all of Mrs. Clinton’s emails public under order of Judge Rudolph Contreras. But the department has said it won’t make all of the emails public from Ms. Abedin or other top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills or Philippe Reines. Instead the department only plans to release those messages specifically requested in open-records demands.

Mrs. Clinton turned over about 30,000 email messages in December, while her aides turned over more than 100,000 pages between them, with the final set only being returned, by Ms. Abedin, earlier this month, the department said in court filings.

Without those documents in hand, the State Department has been unable to do full and complete searches in response to subpoenas, congressional inquiries or Freedom of Information Act requests.

The State Department has asked for dozens of cases to be put on hold while it tries to get a single judge to coordinate all of its searches in more than two dozen cases. But the people requesting the records have objected, and say the State Department has nobody to blame but itself.

“The State Department acts as if Ms. Abedin’s and Ms. Mills’ documents fell from the sky on the eve of the State Department’s production deadline, but that is not remotely the case,” Citizens United, one of the plaintiffs who’s sued under the FOIA, said in a filing late last week.

Citizens United says the State Department missed its own deadline for producing Ms. Mills’s and Ms. Abedin’s documents.

The Obama administration countered that it went above and beyond its duties under the law by asking Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills to return their records and then to search them in response to open-records requests. The State Department says it’s moving as quickly as possible, but says the sheer number of documents — and the number of requests for them — calls for a stay in most cases.

But of the 26 requests where the State Department has sought to halt proceedings, six have already been denied. Only one has been granted, one was granted in part and denied in part by the same judge, and another is being held in abeyance.

The State Department told one of the federal judges Monday that it’s facing nearly 100 different open-records lawsuits — not all of them related to Mrs. Clinton’s email server — that have stretched officials to their limit.

Monday’s FBI letter underscores the tangled situation Mrs. Clinton’s emails have produced. The letter was addressed to Mary McLeod, a lawyer at the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI — and which means, in effect, that the FBI is refusing to talk to its own parent department about the matter.

Mr. Baker pointedly noted in his letter that he was aware the response would be submitted to the court, which would presumably make it public.

Earlier this month the Justice Department, in another pleading, insisted Mrs. Clinton didn’t do anything wrong in being the one who decided which of her messages were official business records that must be returned to the government, and which were purely personal and able to be expunged.

Judicial Watch said that raises thorny questions for a department that is supposedly investigating Mrs. Clinton.

Last week Sen. John Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, called for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to name a special counsel to oversee the investigation, citing too many potential conflicts of interest.