Benghazi! Judge orders new search for Clinton emails

A federal judge is doing the heavy lifting for the Trump administration’s effort to turn the focus back on Hillary Clinton and Benghazi.

Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the State Department has not done enough to try to track down messages that Clinton, as Secretary of State, may have sent about the assault on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya in 2012, according to a report in Politico.

The ruling is in response to a request from Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

“If Secretary Clinton sent an e-mail about Benghazi to Abedin, Mills, or Sullivan at his or her state.gov e-mail address, or if one of them sent an e-mail to Secretary Clinton using his or her state.gov account, then State’s server presumably would have captured and stored such an e-mail. Therefore, State has an obligation to search its own server for responsive records,” Mehta wrote in his ruling on the matter.

You’d think that the matter wouldn’t need to go to court, you know, with the Trump team in charge of the State and Justice departments.

But actually, Justice Department lawyers representing the State Department argued in the federal court that making them search other employees’ account for Clinton emails would set a bad precedent.