State Department officials are facing a pair of deadlines Friday in two separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits aimed at digging up documents related to Hillary Clinton.
Both cases have been stalled by what the agency has characterized as unrelated and unanticipated discoveries of thousands of documents during the review process.
The agency has already fallen far behind in one case, filed by Jason Leopold of Vice News, that should have forced the State Department to release the remaining 8,000 pages of Clinton’s unpublished private emails by the end of January.
In the other case, filed by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, the State Department had been scheduled to explain by Monday how it unexpectedly discovered “thousands” of pages of documents from Clinton’s tenure in the middle of the contentious lawsuit.
However, a federal judge granted the agency an extension to Friday for that explanation due to the snowstorm that hit Washington, D.C., in late January.
The State Department’s failure to meet the Jan. 29 production deadline in the Leopold case stirred speculation that agency officials were working in favor of Clinton, since the delay pushed the release of the final Clinton emails until after the first wave of Democratic primaries. Both the agency and the White House denied any political motivations behind the setback.
Instead, the State Department argued in court documents filed last week that it had made an “error” by neglecting to send 7,254 pages of emails to outside agencies for review before the deadline. Officials said they did not discover the thousands of documents until three weeks prior to the date they were set for release, and asked the court for an extra month to process those emails.
In the meantime, the State Department released roughly 1,000 pages of Clinton’s emails on the Jan. 29 deadline, sparking an uproar by announcing at the same time that 37 pages of documents were withheld in full from that batch because they contained “top secret” intelligence.
Judicial Watch announced in mid-January that the State Department had found “thousands” of new records in the middle of its FOIA lawsuit over documents related to Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton.
“The State Department waited to last possible moment, as it did with the Clinton emails, to tell Judicial Watch and the federal courts about thousands of records that haven’t been searched, as the law requires,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said in January. “Who knew what — and when did they know it — about these new Clinton documents?”
A federal judge asked the State Department to provide “a detailed description of how and when these files were located and why they had not been previously identified” by Friday, the same day the agency is slated to update the court about its progress with the final batch of Clinton emails.
The legal battle over Clinton’s records comes at a pivotal time for Clinton as she heads into what is expected to be a major loss to rival Sen. Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday.
Clinton has been fighting the perception that she is untrustworthy since her use of a private server became public last March.
