State Department officials will not publish the required number of Hillary Clinton’s emails at the end of August, marking the second month in a row that the agency has failed to meet a court-ordered benchmark for the production of the records.
Although a judge laid out a schedule for the agency with specific milestones for the State Department to meet each month, officials said they were unable to meet the July milestone due to the burden of screening the records for classified information.
John Hackett, the State official in charge of responding to the Freedom of Information Act, said the process was slowed when the agency incorporated recommendations from the Intelligence Community Inspector General about how to handle sensitive information that belonged to the intelligence community, according to court documents filed Friday.
The documents were filed as part of a FOIA lawsuit brought by Vice News.
Vice’s case has forced the State Department to publish Clinton’s emails on a rolling basis at the end of every month until January 2016.
Intelligence officials began assisting the State Department in the review process on July 15, the court documents indicate.
That was more than a week before the New York Times published a controversial story about the Intelligence Community Inspector General’s concerns that classified material had been mishandled on the server.
The report prompted a strong response from Clinton’s campaign, which argued against characterizing the ensuing inquiry as a “criminal” probe.
Representatives from five different intelligence agencies participated in the review process.
The reviewers had just eight business days to help State look over emails that could contain sensitive intelligence information before the agency took over the process in order to perform a final screening and to publish the records online.
When intelligence community reviewers found an email that contained information relevant to his or her agency, that document was sent to the individual agency for review and thus not included in the records published at the end of July.
Hackett suggested the referral policy continued to the slow pace of the review.
“But they are now fully integrated into the process, and as they gain familiarity with the documents, I expect the screening of emails for [intelligence community] equities to proceed more quickly,” Hackett said.
Hackett said he expects the State Department to catch up on the emails it should have already published by the end of September.
The State Department will publish at least 6,106 pages of emails by August 31, putting the agency “just shy” of its requirement to have 25 percent of the emails published by that date.
At the end of September, State officials will release 7,156 emails. In doing so, the agency will catch up to the court-ordered proportion of emails that should be published by the end of that month at 37 percent.
“I have been advised that, if necessary, the [intelligence community] reviewers will devote additional hours to the review process.” Hackett added.
The State Department posted just 2,206 pages of emails on July 31, falling far short of the benchmark a judge had demanded the agency meet by the end of last month.
Officials were 1,721 pages of emails behind the threshold.
Clinton handed over nearly 55,000 pages of emails in December of last year, selecting which records she thought were related to her government service and reportedly erasing the rest.
Included in the batch were 1,533 pages of emails that were deemed personal communications and were therefore not subject to the multiple inquiries seeking Clinton’s records.
That left 52,455 pages of emails for State Department reviewers to sift through in preparation for their release.
