State Department officials are set to publish a new batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails thanks to a court order that mandates the release of her records at the end of every month until next year.
The email release will come a little more than a week after Clinton appeared before the committee responsible for uncovering her private email use and testified about her handling of the 2012 terror attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing was widely perceived as a victory for her campaign, one that allowed her to put many concerns about her email use to bed.
But the release of thousands of additional pages of emails she kept on a private server in her basement will likely revive questions about why she went to such great lengths to conceal her records when she served as secretary of state.
The drumbeat of emails emerging at the end of each month from the State Department has prevented the email controversy from fading, despite the Clinton campaign’s attempts to diffuse the story.
The Democratic frontrunner seized on comments from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy late last month in which the Republican congressional leader suggested the select committee had been set up to drag down Clinton’s poll numbers.
McCarthy unwittingly touched off a firestorm of criticism for the Benghazi probe. Democrats on and off the panel escalated calls for an end to the investigation, and Clinton headed into her highly-anticipated interview with the committee just as doubts about its existence had begun to boil.
The dust-up, which knocked McCarthy out of contention in the House speaker race, gave Clinton an opportunity to paint congressional concerns about her emails as a partisan exercise.
However, a Justice Department investigation of the private email network used by Clinton and at least one of her aides is still underway. The FBI-led probe has proven more difficult for the campaign to downplay, as reports have indicated the law enforcement agency is looking into whether the former secretary of state violated provisions of the Espionage Act.
Clinton’s team maintains the probe is not criminal in nature and has repeatedly characterized it as a routine “security inquiry.”
But the FBI took Clinton’s server into custody in August despite her insistence that the hardware would “remain private,” prompting speculation that the investigation had turned up a serious breach of classification laws.
Although 403 of the emails that have been released to date have been marked classified, Clinton has said she did nothing wrong because none of the records were marked classified at the time they were transmitted.
The published portion of the nearly 55,000 pages of emails Clinton handed over in December of last year have offered a limited glimpse into how Clinton operated her State Department.
The records reveal her preoccupation with how the press viewed her policies and her behind-the-scenes ties to the Clinton Foundation while in office.
