White House Attorneys Scrambling Over Hillary Emails

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email practices are now becoming a legal headache for the Obama administration, which for the first time has admitted to a court that the former secretary of state withheld her emails.

Administration attorneys are now scrambling to contain the damage by promising to redo what eventually could be hundreds of open records searches that were tainted by Mrs. Clinton’s email practices and those of her top aides, who, according to a New York Times report Monday, also occasionally used private emails to communicate.

The government attorneys, however, insist that the officials didn’t break the law or act in bad faith by not revealing to anyone that it never searched Mrs. Clinton’s emails, despite hundreds of requests for her electronic communications that were unable to be completely fulfilled because the department didn’t gain access to her messages until late last year.

“It’s a con game. They’ve been caught in a con,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that filed 160 open-records requests that could have been tainted by Mrs. Clinton’s email practices. “The concern is there’s been misconduct and misrepresentation and fraud on the courts, and certainly on Judicial Watch.”

His organization has asked a court to reopen one case seeking Mrs. Clinton’s emails, saying the State Department couldn’t have completed a search last year because it never had her emails in the first place.

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