State Department officials are set to release 550 of Hillary Clinton’s private emails Saturday amid increasing scrutiny of the former secretary of state’s personal server use.
While the agency should have released the final unpublished batch of Clinton’s emails at the end of January, officials missed the court-ordered deadline because they accidentally overlooked more than 7,000 pages of emails that needed to be sent to other agencies for review.
The State Department then attempted to delay the publication of those emails until the end of February. That would have pushed the last email release until after the primaries and caucuses in South Carolina and Nevada and allowed the agency to publish the records just hours before the rash of Super Tuesday contests.
But a federal judge ruled Thursday the State Department must post the records online in four separate installments spread throughout the month of February to maximize the chances that voters will have an opportunity to see the emails. She has repeatedly argued the investigation is nothing more than a “security review.”
As many as 29 emails have been withheld by the State Department to date because they contain “top secret” intelligence. A spokesman for the agency refused Friday to specify whether the upcoming batches of emails would contain more “top secret” documents.
State Department officials have published thousands of pages of Clinton’s emails on a rolling basis since June of last year thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Jason Leopold of Vice News.
