State Department officials are set to release a new batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails Wednesday amid growing speculation that the government does not have a complete record of Clinton’s communications.
Following a court order in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Vice News, the State Department must release a set number of Clinton’s emails at the end of each month until Jan. 2016.
The agency fell behind court-ordered benchmarks for email production in July when it published 1,721 fewer pages than a judge had ordered them to release that month. The State Department caught back up the following month, releasing 7,121 pages of emails at the end of August.
Agency officials have now screened and posted online a quarter of Clinton’s private emails.
State Department officials have blamed delays in publishing emails and answering other FOIA requests on the intense burden that Clinton’s emails have placed on the records office.
The September release comes as investigators look into an email chain provided by the Pentagon that indicates Clinton withheld at least one work-related conversation from the State Department.
Documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, exposed a two-month gap in emails from the first weeks Clinton served as secretary of state. She has claimed the two months were part of a transition period onto the server that came to house the rest of her records.
The email gaps, coupled with the newly-discovered email chain, have revived charges that Clinton may have withheld records that could have posed uncomfortable questions for her campaign.
That possibility first arose in June, when one of her top confidantes, Sidney Blumenthal, gave the House Select Committee on Benghazi 15 emails that Clinton never provided the State Department.
Even so, Clinton stated in a sworn declaration signed Aug. 8 that she had turned over all work-related records.
The former secretary of state has faced scrutiny over the volume of classified material among her emails as well. To date, the State Department has moved to classify 188 emails.
