State Department will comply with court order on Hillary Clinton emails

A federal judge rejected State’s proposal to release all the emails by early 2016, a plan it offered in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Vice News. Instead, the judge said a plan to release emails on a “rolling basis” is needed, and State said it would do so.

“We will comply with that aspect,” spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters Tuesday.

But Rathke didn’t know much else about the process of preparing the 55,000 pages of Clinton emails for public release. Rathke didn’t know, for example, how many of those pages had been reviewed yet.

He also didn’t know why State preferred to release all the emails at once, when they already exist in dozen of separate batches that have been through varying degrees of review.

“That was the plan that we had originally proposed, which we spoke about from the very first time this issue came up,” he said.

When asked what was taking so long, Rathke said it was the sheer number of email pages to sift through. But he didn’t have an update on how many pages had been reviewed so far.

“I’m not in a position to preview where that stands,” he said. When pressed on whether that means that maybe none of the emails have been reviewed, he said, “I didn’t say that, I just said I don’t have an update on where that process stands.”

State said earlier this year that it wants to release the emails “soon,” as has Clinton herself. But State has said it would redact all the emails for several reasons, including to prevent the release of personal material.

State’s court filing in the Vice News case indicated some information may have to be redacted because it could reflect poorly on countries that might be named in the emails. But State dodged questions about this, and declined to say whether State was talking with other countries about possibly damaging information that might be released.