A batch of Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails made public Friday by the State Department contained dozens of duplicate records, meaning the agency may have delayed the release of most new records until weeks, or even days, before the presidential election.
The 273 pages of emails were recovered by the FBI from Clinton’s private server. State Department officials said none of those 75 conversations were classified.
“In relation to the 75 documents we are releasing today, more than half are ‘near duplicates’ of documents previously provided by former Secretary Clinton and released in previous [Freedom of Information Act] productions of her emails,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby in a statement. “For instance, a ‘near duplicate’ would be substantively identical to previously released emails but for a top email in the chain stating ‘Please print.'”
Emails that appeared to be new included a transcript of an interview Chelsea Clinton gave to BBC in Oct. 2012, an email from Clinton to former President Jimmy Carter attempting to set up a phone call and a climate change memo for the former secretary of state written by her husband and delivered via Justin Cooper, the Clinton Foundation aide who managed the private server system.
Cooper’s role at the State Department seemed to go beyond managing the server, however.
In one email from July 2011, Cooper advised Clinton on an upcoming speech about climate change and coordinated with her assistant on “edits” to the speech draft. Cooper was not employed by the State Department.
Some of Clinton’s responses to previously-released emails shed additional light on how she handled requests from insiders.
For example, a Jan. 2010 email advocating for a Haiti relief contractor sent to Clinton from Burns Strider, an alum of her 2008 campaign who went on to work at a lobbying shop, had already been released earlier this year.
But her enthusiastic reply, in which she vowed to “have folks follow up,” was originally withheld. The Clintons’ work in Haiti has been widely criticized for providing more assistance to well-connected companies than struggling Haitians.
In one previously undisclosed email from Jan. 2010, former Clinton pollster Mark Penn told Clinton that the “only way for [President Obama] to win second term” was to ask Clinton to be his vice president.
“He will realize that after midterms,” Penn wrote.
Clinton asked her assistant to print the message.
At least six of the 75 email chains dealt with Haitian relief efforts, which were spearheaded by Cheryl Mills, then Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, and Bill Clinton, who was then the United Nations special envoy to Haiti and then a co-chair of the UN’s Interim Haiti Relief Commission. The Clinton Foundation was heavily involved as well, spending more than $60 million there.
The State Department had been asked in the FOIA lawsuit brought by conservative-leaning Judicial Watch to process 350 pages by Friday. Agency officials said they withheld 77 pages of emails that were exact copies of previously-released records.
Clinton will weather three additional document dumps before voters head to the polls on Nov. 8. The State Department determined that roughly 5,600 of the 15,000 emails turned over by the FBI were work-related and therefore subject to release. Of those 5,600 emails, up to half are duplicates, the agency has said.
Federal judges in multiple cases have pushed the State Department to publish as many documents as possible by Election Day. Even so, not all records will see the light of day before Nov. 8.
