A federal judge ordered the State Department Tuesday to provide 700 new pages of records from Hillary Clinton’s former office by Dec. 1, paving the way for a spate of document releases that could continue well into next year.
The order by Judge Rudolph Contreras pushed agency officials to finish searching documents from Clinton’s time as secretary of State, including emails, memos and notes, by the end of the year, according to court documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Jason Leopold of Vice News had first filed a broad request under the Freedom of Information Act for virtually all written records from Clinton and her staff in November of last year, long before the public learned Clinton had shielded her communications on a private server.
That FOIA case eventually prompted the court’s high-profile decision to force the State Department to publish all of Clinton’s emails in batches at the end of every month.
Now, the agency could be compelled to prepare thousands of additional documents for release in order to satisfy other aspects of Leopold’s FOIA request, which was narrowed after he and his attorney, Ryan James, sued the State Department.
Emails and other written records produced by Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Philippe Reines, and a number of other Clinton aides are included in the request and could become part of a second major document release by the State Department.
Leopold is seeking records related to a wide variety of subjects, from “efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden” to the Keystone pipeline.
While the State Department has been hit with dozens of FOIA lawsuits over Clinton’s records, few have been as successful in extracting documents from the agency as the one Contreras heard Tuesday. The original request included a provision seeking notes from any meeting Clinton or a member of her staff may have attended at the State Department, opening the door for the production of documents that could shed more light on how she and her aides operated.
Critics have argued that because Clinton’s legal team was permitted to delete thousands of emails before turning the rest over to the government, the record cannot be considered complete until the discarded communications are located.
Clinton maintains the roughly 30,000 emails she scrubbed from her server last year were personal in nature and therefore wouldn’t have been subject to FOIA requests in the first place.
