A federal judge has ordered the State Department to release email records from Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state on a rolling basis, rejecting the agency’s plan to hand over all 55,000 pages at once early next year.
The emails are at the center of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Vice News and have become the subject of intense national attention as their author ramps up her second presidential campaign.
A lawyer for Vice News told Politico the State Department had one week to establish a timeline for the intermittent release of Clinton’s records.
State Department officials argued Monday that they would not be finished screening the emails for sensitive or private information until January, at which point the agency would publish the majority of the records on its website.
But a judge in the U.S. District Court ordered a “rolling production” of the emails instead, forcing State to release the records under typical FOIA rules as it combed through the massive cache.
Clinton gave the agency 55,000 printed pages of email records in November of last year before supposedly deleting thousands of additional communications her staff deemed unrelated to her State Department work.
The agency has struggled to keep up with the deluge of FOIA requests and lawsuits that hit the State Department after news of Clinton’s reliance on a private email account and server to conduct official business sparked public outrage.
Agency officials have even attempted to blame the State Department’s mounting backlog of FOIA requests on the strain that the Clinton email review has placed on agency resources.
