Hillary Clinton's State Department FOIA Expert Goes After Trump White House

Betsy Woodruff, Daily Beast, July 13, 2017

The Justice Department turned over paperwork Thursday morning showing that Attorney General Jeff Sessions didn’t tell the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador when he applied for his security clearance.

The revelation came because a new watchdog group successfully sued for Sessions’ clearance application under the Freedom of Information Act—though the document they got was heavily redacted.

The Justice Department says Sessions wasn’t obligated to tell the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador because he had them in his capacity as a U.S. senator. But Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, the watchdog group that got the DOJ to release the document, said Sessions should have revealed the meetings.

“We are not talking about the ambassador from the Vatican or from Canada,” he said. “We are talking about the ambassador from Russia, about whom there is common knowledge there are significant espionage concerns. You should not get cute with questions from the FBI related to national security.”

Evers would know. After all, he helped the State Department manage FOIA requests on Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Read more here.