The State Department must release batches of emails belonging to former secretary of state and presidential contender Hillary Clinton ever 30 days, beginning at the end of next month, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras has ordered the State Department to release some of the 55,000 Clinton emails on a monthly basis starting June 30 and ending Jan. 29, 2016, two days before the Iowa Democratic caucus.
The ruling is in response to a civil suit by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold, who had been seeking the release of some of Clinton’s emails every two weeks. The State Department, which initially proposed a one-time release in January, had offered on Tuesday to release the emails every 60 days.
The court appears to have compromised between the two sides.
Clinton’s emails surfaced as part of the investigation by a House special committee examining the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.
Clinton disclosed that during her tenure as secretary of state, she operated a private server and private email address. Clinton then handed over 55,000 emails from the server to the State Department, which is sorting through them as part of a process in which they will scrub them for sensitive or classified information and then release them.
The State Department made public about 900 of the emails last week.
