State Department officials published about 70 emails on Friday that the FBI recovered during its year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server.
The approximately 280 pages of documents contained work-related material that Clinton did not turn over in Dec. 2014, when she provided the State Department with 55,000 pages of hand-picked records.
While Clinton claimed they were deleted because they were not work-related, most of the emails appear to be related to her job, and many have been redacted, apparently because they contain sensitive information related to her tenure at the State Department.
The release Friday marked the 19th and final batch of Clinton emails to be posted publicly before Election Day. Between May 2015 and February, the document dumps became a monthly ritual that kept the email controversy alive throughout the first year of Clinton’s campaign.
FBI Director James Comey’s decision last week to reopen the email investigation has resurrected that controversy just a few days before voters head to the polls. He said thousands of additional emails were found on a computer used by her top aide, Huma Abedin, and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner.
Democrats have excoriated Comey for announcing the reopened probe so close to Election Day, while Republicans have mostly viewed his move as a correction to what they considered a flawed decision by Comey to close the investigation in the first place.
The FBI discovered 15,000 emails in the course of their initial investigation and turned those over to the State Department in July. Of those, roughly 5,600 were deemed work-related, and up to half of them were duplicates of emails Clinton already provided.
That left at least 2,800 new, work-related emails in the batch of records recovered by the FBI.
Clinton has asserted repeatedly that she turned over all work-related emails in 2014 and that the thousands she deleted were purely personal in nature.
