Can I get an 'oh shit' outta people? 'Amen' ain't gonna cover this... my mind is a bit blown.

There are new press releases to wade through today at Judicial Watch, and especially given the surge of information gurgling up over our heads, it's kinda hard to keep all the moving parts in mind as the puzzle image begins to emerge. In this essay, we're gonna work with this press release:

New Documents Show Top Clinton Aide Alerted On Email Inquiry

Judicial Watch today provides information so we can follow them in how information about the private server came to light. In this email, we learn just how it was that the private server was suspected and who submitted the original FOIA request to the Department of State fishing for how Clinton corresponded with her staff and others. The thread of this story begins back in December of 2012 when Cheryl Mills receives an email from Brock Johnson, a State Department Spokesman, pointing out that State has received a significant request for FOIA information:

Anne Weismann of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) requesting “records sufficient to show the number of email accounts of or associated with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the extent to which those email accounts are identifiable as those of or associated with Secretary Clinton.”

Follow the dancing ball here, it gets a little crazy. We learn the following information through a link JW provides to a March 2016 Washington Free Beacon article. Here we learn that CREW made this request on a hunch based upon recently revealed information:

CREW’s request came on the heels of news that former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson had used an alias email account to conduct government business, and the organization was seeking to see if other senior officials used similar pseudonymous email accounts.

Read the Politico story on the Lisa Jackson email (spoiler alert: the account was named after her dog). Here's a preview:

The internal account exists so that Jackson’s communications with other government officials aren’t buried under the crush of emails flooding into her public account, jackson.lisap@epa.gov, which got 1.5 million emails in fiscal year 2012, EPA says. The agency says such dual- account arrangements have been standard practice since the Clinton administration, when EPA Administrator Carol Browner was first assigned two @epa.gov email addresses.

“For more than a decade, EPA administrators have been assigned two official, government-issued email accounts: a public account and an internal account,” EPA said in a statement to POLITICO. “The email address for the public account is posted on EPA's website and is used by hundreds of thousands of Americans to send messages to the administrator. The internal account is an everyday, working email account of the administrator to communicate with staff and other government officials.”

Going back to the Free Beacon piece, we learn next that CREW got an acknowledgement of receipt of their request by State, then nothing further, and that the log file at State shows this FOIA request as closed. Seems odd. The following is the list of others Free Beacon asserts who have not heard back from State on FOIA requests:

CREW is only one of several groups whose FOIA requests for records on the former secretary of state and her top staff were either rejected or slow-walked to the point of being a de facto denial.

Gawker filed a FOIA request in 2013 for emails between Philippe Reines, a former State Department spokesman and longtime Clinton staffer, and more than 30 news organizations, only to be told a year later that the department could locate no such emails.

The Associated Press has several outstanding FOIA requests regarding the secretary of state’s office, one of which is over four years old, and is currently mulling a lawsuit against the State Department.

Citizens United, a conservative political advocacy group, sued the State Department in December for failing to turn over flight records showing who accompanied Clinton on overseas flights.

A Vice News reporter is also suing the State Department for its records on Clinton.

The Washington Free Beacon has filed FOIA requests for the internal processing notes on how the State Department handled Gawker and CREW’s requests.

We apparently know all of this because Judicial Watch picked up the ball earlier this year. Here's the clue Free Beacon slips in about why CREW dropped pursuit of this matter:

CREW is now run by David Brock, a staunch Clinton defender and founder of Media Matters. Brock has saturated cable news airwaves this week pushing back against allegations that Clinton acted unethically in using private email.

Let's let New Republic bring us up to date from back in August 2014:

Here's Another Sign That Hillary Clinton's the New Boss in Town

Wednesday night, Politico’s Ken Vogel broke the news that David Brock, right-wing-hitman-turned-Hillary-Clinton-bodyguard, is taking over the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW). That means Brock now controls not only CREW, but also the Democrat-backing nonprofits and Super PACS Media Matters, American Bridge, American Independent Institute, and Correct the Record. It’s a veritable empire of liberal third-party groups! All of which prompted Vogel to write on Twitter, immediately after his CREW scoop came out, that Brock is now the Democrats’ version of Karl Rove.

It’s a title Brock has been gunning for since at least 2010, when, in the wake of the Republican rout in the midterm elections, he announced his plans to start American Bridge. Brock, who at the time only counted Media Matters as a jewel in his crown, initially positioned American Bridge as the liberal analogue to Rove’s American Crossroads group, the outside conservative group that played such a key role in the GOP’s 2010 efforts. In Brock’s vision, American Bridge would be a behemoth that raised and spent millions of dollars, primarily on television ads, to benefit Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates in 2012.

I presented it that way to reinforce a name which may be newly familiar to many of us - this is the same Ken Vogel who ran a piece by the DNC on Hillary Victory Fund before publishing it. He's been paying attention.

David Brock expands empire

By Kenneth P. Vogel

In a major power play that aligns liberal muscle more fully behind the Democratic Party — and Hillary Clinton — the self-described right-wing hitman-turned-Clinton enforcer David Brock is taking over a leading watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Brock was elected chairman of the group’s board last week after laying out a multifaceted expansion intended to turn the group into a more muscular — and likely partisan — attack dog, according to sources familiar with the move.

Did David Brock take over CREW to silence the inquiry about the server or was that just a bonus cake?

I'll close with more verbiage from Judicial Watch in case anyone is still glued to this train wreck in progress:

In January 2016 the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report titled “Evaluation of the Department of State’s FOIA Processes for Requests Involving the Office of the Secretary,” which highlighted systemic problems within the State Department’s FOIA processing practices that led to “inaccurate and incomplete” responses to records requests:

In December 2012, the nonprofit organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a FOIA request to the Department seeking records “sufficient to show the number of email accounts of, or associated with, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the extent to which those email accounts are identifiable as those of or associated with Secretary Clinton.” On May 10, 2013, IPS [Information Programs and Services] replied to CREW, stating that “no records responsive to your request were located.” At the time the request was received, dozens of senior officials throughout the Department, including members of Secretary Clinton’s immediate staff, exchanged emails with the Secretary using the personal accounts she used to conduct official business. OIG found evidence that the Secretary’s then-Chief of Staff was informed of the request at the time it was received and subsequently tasked staff to follow up. However, OIG found no evidence to indicate that any of these senior officials reviewed the search results or approved the response to CREW. OIG also found no evidence that the S/ES [Office of Secretary and Executive Secretariat], L [Office of the Legal Adviser], and IPS staff involved in responding to requests for information, searching for records, or drafting the response had knowledge of the Secretary’s email usage. Furthermore, it does not appear that S/ES searched any email records, even though the request clearly encompassed emails.

***

On August 11, 2014, the Department produced to the House Select Committee on Benghazi documents related to the 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi. The production included a number of emails revealing that Secretary Clinton used a personal email account to conduct official business. OIG discovered four instances, between July and September 2014, in which staff from L, A, or the Bureau of Legislative Affairs reviewed the CREW request and the Department’s May 2013 response, but the Department did not amend its response. L and A [Bureau of Administration] staff also told OIG that the Department does not customarily revise responses to closed FOIA requests. Nevertheless, during the course of this review, Department staff advised OIG of their belief that the Department’s response to CREW was incorrect and that it should have been revised to include the former Secretary’s personal email account used to conduct official government business.

When asked during her deposition by Judicial Watch about CREW’s FOIA request, Mills spent several minutes testifying she could not recall much of anything about the controversy, despite its recency:

Q Okay. Do you recall a FOIA request that came in from CREW that’s discussed in this document [a letter from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) inquiring about the handling of the CREW FOIA request]?

A I don’t recall the specific FOIA request in terms of what was in the request. But I’ve obviously seen references to this in the media since then.

Q Do you recall a FOIA request that came in relating to — when you were at the State Department, of course, relating to the e-mail accounts used by Secretary Clinton and records that would provide for what the e-mail address was?

A I don’t have a specific recollection of it. But I certainly have read in the media exactly what is in here. And so while it doesn’t necessarily refresh my recollection, I do know that this – obviously this matter took place.

Q Okay. Do you recall or did Brock Johnson bring this FOIA request to your attention?

A I don’t have a specific memory of that.

Q Did you ever – or did you speak with Heather Samuelson [State Department and Clinton attorney who handled Clinton emails] regarding the CREW request?

A I don’t have a memory of that.

* * *

As much as I do NOT generally agree with Judicial Watch and their priorities, they've got their teeth in this whole issue and they are doing their damnedest to shake the story out.