State Department officials published roughly 1,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s private emails Friday evening amid controversy over the agency’s decision to withhold 22 emails it deemed “top secret.”
The State Department should have posted more than 9,000 pages online by Friday, but missed the court-ordered deadline due to an “oversight” earlier this month.
According to court documents filed late Thursday evening, State Department officials discovered on the week of Jan. 11 more than 7,000 pages of emails that still needed to be reviewed by other agencies. Officials said they quickly began sending those records off to outside offices for review.
However, the State Department has not said why it did not release 2,000 pages Friday, if the only obstacle to publishing the documents was the need for an interagency review for the neglected 7,000 pages.
The announcement Friday that 37 pages of emails would be withheld in full due to the top secret information within them marked a significant departure from the State Department’s tone on the Clinton emails in the 10 months since the public first learned of the existence of Clinton’s private server.
John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, acknowledged for the first time that some of the emails may have been considered classified at the time they were written, regardless of whether they were marked as such. He admitted the agency had begun looking into the issue of whether the emails were classified when written.
Agency officials have said they plan to release the remaining 8,000 pages of emails by the end of February, although the month-long extension would push the publication of the final batch of Clinton emails until after the first wave of Democratic primaries.
