President Trump has expressed his desire for the State Department to expedite the release of the remaining emails from Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized server during her time as secretary of state, according to a new report.
Trump wants to the release the emails as part of an effort to provide greater “transparency” amid frustration that government agencies have been sluggish in responding to requests for the emails to be made public, sources told CNN.
The State Department still has 40,000 pages of records that it must assess for possible release. Clinton’s emails from her tenure as secretary of state may be included in this trove.
The FBI discovered these documents and gave them to the State Department in the summer as the result of an investigation concerning the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.
According to Judicial Watch, the State Department has processed 32,000 pages of the records recovered from Weiner. But thousands of Clinton’s work-related emails already were given to the State Department separately per Clinton’s request and were released. Some may be duplicates already obtained by the FBI.
The State Department has been required to process 500 pages of Clinton records each month, based on the order of a federal judge. The documents with highest public interest were also ordered to be released first.
This follows a report that Trump exerted pressure on the Justice Department and actively pursued lifting a gag order on an undercover FBI informant so he could testify to Congress about the Russian nuclear industry’s bribery and money laundering during the time of the Obama administration.
The report also said Russians sent millions of dollars to a Clinton charity from 2009 to 2013 while she was serving as secretary of state.
The effort to make information available to the public in both cases is not motivated by any individual or issue, CNN reported.
