A longtime Clinton aide may be stonewalling a State Department request for private Benghazi-related emails despite a court order demanding she produce them.
Huma Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the State Department and current campaign staffer, is the only former aide to Secretary Hillary Clinton that has failed to turn over emails in response to a request from the State Department, court documents show.
Cheryl Mills, Clinton's chief of staff at State, and Jake Sullivan, her deputy, submitted personal emails to the agency June 26 in response to letter sent by the agency earlier this year to Abedin, Mills and Sullivan.
The letters demanded the three aides "make available to the Department any federal records that they may have in their possession, such as emails concerning official government business sent or received on a personal email account while serving in their official capacities with the Department," the State Department said in court filings.
The emails of top Clinton aides are at the center of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch for documentation of the internal deliberations that eventually produced flawed Benghazi talking points, which infamously blamed the 2012 terror attack on a YouTube clip.
While the court documents suggest Abedin's attorney indicated to State she has begun the process of searching her personal records, the campaign aide has yet to submit documents that could shed additional light on the talking points.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the case has produced the first evidence that Clinton was involved in the preparation of the misleading talking points, which were given to Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice days after the Benghazi attack and repeated on several political talk shows.
However, the State Department said it withheld in full an email chain, on which Clinton was included, that had "been discussing the talking points given to Ambassador Rice."
"They want to end the case without doing anything beyond looking at the cache of documents Mrs. Clinton supposedly gave them," Fitton said.
The State Department has moved to end the case despite the fact that "they acknowledged, at least, that there could still be documents out there," Fitton added, referring to the fact that Abedin has failed to respond to State's letter.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on Abedin's records.