Stunning -- Justice Department lawyers argue Hillary Clinton had the right to delete any emails she chose

From Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker Blog:

Using laugh-out-loud justification, Justice Department lawyers have asserted to a federal judge that Hillary Clinton should be trusted to decide what records she chooses to delete, with no outside review. Ruby Kramer of Buzzfeed is correct: a brief filed by Justice Department attorneys on Wednesday, was “little-noticed.” Yet it contains a shocking position for federal lawyers to assert to a court.

It should be noted that the brief was filed in a FOIA lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, which has uncovered so much shocking material in the Hillary email scandal. And those DoJ lawyers are acting to represent the State Department, which has consistently stonewalled and taken a hard line in defense of Clinton.

But perhaps the most shocking position taken by the DoJ lawyers is this:

[T]he lawyers argue that, without reason to believe that Clinton was not honest and forthcoming in selecting and turning over her federal records, no government agency would be required to “recover deleted material based on unfounded speculation that responsive information had been deleted.” Such was the case with Clinton, the lawyers say.

Ahem… “honest and forthcoming” are the two most inappropriate adjectives possible to describe Hillary Clinton’s approach to her emails. She after all contended that she neither sent nor received any classified information, a contention that is now revealed by multiple government analysts to be false.

Over at Hot Air, there is a follow up thought:

Say… I wonder if the IRS would be willing to allow me to go through all of my tax documents, decide which ones were “relevant” and just toss the rest in the old burn barrel? I mean, there’s no reason to think I wasn’t being honest and forthcoming, so pesky little details such as those should be left to my discretion. Even more to the point, if something of interest to the police takes place on my property and it’s captured by my security cameras, I suppose I can decide which footage is relevant and worthy of retention. This is truly wild.