State Department officials touted their “commitment to transparency” in announcing plans to wait until 9 p.m. before releasing a batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
A court order required the agency to publish 7 percent of the 55,000 pages of Clinton emails by the end of the month.
By waiting until three hours before July begins, the agency is technically still in compliance with the judge’s order.
But the seemingly deliberate effort to minimize scrutiny of the emails has ruffled many journalistic feathers.
“It’s just ridiculous,” said Jason Leopold, the reporter for Vice News whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuit prompted the release.
“Obviously, it’s not a violation of the court order because it still falls within the end of the month time frame,” Leopold said. “But it just seems to be a way in which many agencies, when they release reports, just sort of dump it out there and hopes nobody notices.”
State officials attempted to blame the late-night document dump on the technical challenges of uploading so many documents to their website.
“They knew they had to make a production by the end of the month, so they were aware of that,” Leopold noted.
What’s more, State has said in court filings for a different FOIA lawsuit that it planned to finish digitizing Clinton’s email records by mid-June.
Leopold, who presently has four FOIA cases pending against the State Department, said he expected to see parts of the emails redacted under exemptions in the records law that allow the government to withhold any information it considers part of an official decision-making process.
“I am going to say that I believe that they will be redacted,” Leopold said. “If I’m wrong, great, that’s great for transparency. But I think they’re going to apply those exemptions.”
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the late-night release is “an all-too-common delaying tactic” from the federal government.
“It guarantees one less day of negative news coverage during this July 4th holiday week,” Fitton said.
“The timing suggests there’ll be interesting material” in the emails slated for publication Tuesday evening, he added.
The State Department was forced to begin publishing emails on a rolling basis after Vice sued the agency in January over its neglected Freedom of Information Act request for the records.
A judge ordered State officials to publish chunks of the emails each month, setting specific targets for the number of records that would be released at each milestone until the deadline of Jan. 29, 2016 arrived.
Vice’s legal team argued in court documents filed May 27 that the agency should be forced to produce documents more frequently due to the volume of the emails, the intense public interest in them and “the fact that the records pertain to a declared presidential candidate participating in an election process in which caucusing begins on February 1, 2016.”
The court order required State to publish 7 percent of the 55,000 pages of emails Clinton submitted to the agency in November of last year for its first production under the lawsuit.
Because the State Department published more than 800 pages of Benghazi-related emails last month, officials plan to release just 3,000 pages — or roughly 5 percent — of the Clinton email cache late Tuesday evening. The new emails will be communications sent and received in 2009, the first year of Clinton’s tenure.
Scrutiny of Clinton’s use of a private email and server to conduct her government affairs was reignited earlier this month after Congress said a Benghazi witness, Sidney Blumenthal, submitted dozens of emails that State hadn’t disclosed.
State officials admitted last week they were unable to find 15 of the Blumenthal emails among the roughly 30,000 Clinton had provided.
In some instances, the agency could only locate portions of records submitted by Blumenthal.
The revelation suggests Clinton sifted through her private emails and withheld those she didn’t want the public to see. It also indicates she screened the communications closely enough to identify specific passages that might cause problems for her campaign if they were released.
