State Department officials will fall short of a court order compelling them to produce nearly 9,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s private emails by the end of December.
Instead, the agency will publish 5,500 pages of Clinton’s emails Thursday and make another production of emails “sometime next week,” State Department officials said Thursday morning.
“We have worked diligently to come as close to the goal as possible, but with the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule we have not met the goal this month,” the agency said in a statement.
The shortcoming is not the first time the agency has failed to meet a court-ordered benchmark for the production of Clinton’s emails. The State Department fell short of its goal in July before ramping up efforts to screen the former secretary of state’s records.
In addition to missing thousands of pages of Clinton’s emails, Thursday’s batch will not contain the subject fields, senders or recipients of emails in the usual format. The omission will make it more difficult for reporters to comb through the emails, which will not even be published online until late in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve.
The benchmarks for publishing a certain percentage of the Clinton emails at the end of each month until January were set in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Jason Leopold of Vice News.
