Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Friday the State Department’s failure to publish the required number of Hillary Clinton’s private emails by a court-ordered deadline suggests the agency is covering for the former secretary of state.
“The notion that a months-long process could be hit with 11th-hour delays reeks of political favoritism designed to hide the ball from voters on the eve of early state voting,” Priebus said in a statement released shortly after the State Department announced its intention to fall more than 8,000 pages short of a benchmark that was set by a federal judge in May.
In court documents filed late Thursday evening, the State Department argued it had accidentally “overlooked” more than 7,000 pages of emails that should have long ago been sent to other agencies for review.
State officials asked the court to push the deadline back to Feb. 29 in order to give more than two dozen other agencies enough time to look over the neglected emails.
Priebus called the argument “further proof that the Obama Administration would rather flaunt an order from a federal judge than reveal just how badly Hillary Clinton’s reckless conduct jeopardized our national security.”
The State Department was required to publish all 55,000 pages of Clinton’s emails by Friday, according to an agreement struck last year between the government and Jason Leopold, the Vice News reporter who filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the records.
But the sudden delay could stall the release of the final batch of Clinton emails until after the first round of Democratic primaries and caucuses, forcing millions to vote without knowing what was said in the most “complex” emails of the entire stash.
A federal judge has yet to rule on whether the State Department will be allowed the full month-long extension it sought last week.
