The lawyer for the reporter suing to force the State Department to produce the rest of Hillary Clinton’s private emails by Friday says there’s still a chance that demand will have to be met, depending on what the judge says.
“The politically correct thing to say is that there is still time for a ruling from the court before the Friday production deadline, and that we’ll cross that bridge if and when we get to it,” Ryan James told the Washington Examiner. James is representing Jason Leopold in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the records.
Leopold filed the suit after State Department attorneys requested an additional month to produce the emails in court documents filed Friday. State blamed the delay in part on a winter storm that temporarily shuttered the government last week.
Officials also attributed the delay to the fact that they had accidentally overlooked thousands of pages of documents that needed to be sent to other agencies for review before the State Department could make them public. But James says State has had plenty of time to finish the job this month.
“Given the ‘oversight’ that caused the delay was discovered around January 11, one might think the administration could muster enough resources to handle the additional volume with almost three weeks still to go before the January 29 deadline,” James said.
“Regardless of what happens in court this week, there is a bigger issue,” he added. “This lawsuit is not about helping Clinton get the emails out as she has requested for months, and before the general where it might risk putting the county in the hands of a GOP president, or about hurting her. It is about the legal responsibility and fundamental principle of democracy that the democratically elected government of, by and for the people, must open its records to the people it serves.”
James said the ruling in Leopold’s FOIA case was especially significant because of the legal uncertainty surrounding the question of whether the contents of a “home brew” server are subject to open records requests.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner confirmed Wednesday the agency planned to release only a portion of the remaining 7,000 pages of emails by Friday, while the rest are slated for release at the end of February.
However, a judge could decide before that time that the State Department needs to produce the remainder of the emails before the end of the month.
The State Department’s delay will push the release of the final batch of Clinton’s emails past the first wave of Democratic primaries, forcing people to vote for or against Clinton without knowing what the last of her records contain.
The agency has been forced to release Clinton’s emails on a rolling basis at the end of every month since May.
