A federal judge has rejected the State Department’s request for a month-long delay in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over Hillary Clinton’s emails.
While the agency was supposed to have completed its review of Clinton’s private emails by the end of January, State Department officials attempted to push the deadline back to Feb. 29 due to an “error” that caused the agency to overlook more than 7,000 pages of records.
But Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court told the State Department Tuesday he was reluctant to allow the agency to stall the release of the final batch of Clinton emails until the end of the month. He instead asked the State Department to publish what they could by Feb. 18 at the latest.
Contreras did not set a new deadline for the release of all remaining Clinton emails.
The State Department’s attempt to stretch the production schedule in the Clinton email case would put the last document dump after the first round of Democratic primaries and prohibit the media from circulating in-depth stories about the emails until the “Super Tuesday” nominating contests were well underway on March 1.
The agency has been forced to publish all 55,000 pages of Clinton’s private emails through a series of monthly releases that began in June of last year thanks to a FOIA lawsuit filed by Jason Leopold of Vice News.
Late last month, the State Department announced its decision to withhold 37 pages of emails that contained “top secret” information. The move suggested Clinton and her aides could be in deeper legal trouble than experts initially guessed.
Contreras is expected to enter a formal order Tuesday. He required the State Department to answer further questions in a filing by Tuesday as well.
