Roughly 55,000 pages of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server could be released by January 2016.
The State Department proposed January 2016 as the deadline to complete a review and public release of emails she sent and received during her time with the federal government.
The proposal came Monday night in a declaration filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, a response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in January by Vice News seeking all of Clinton’s emails.
“The Department’s plan … would result in its review being completed by the end of the year. To factor in the holidays, however, the Department would ask the Court to adopt a proposed completion date of January 15, 2016,” State’s acting director of Information Programs and Services John Hackett said in the proposal filed.
“The Department understands the considerable public’s [sic] interest in these records and is endeavoring to complete the review and production of them as expeditiously as possible. The collection is, however, voluminous and, due to the breadth of topics, the nature of the communications, and the interests of several agencies, presents several challenges,” Hackett added.
The controversy over Clinton’s emails began in March, when the New York Times revealed Clinton had a separate, private email account she used during her time as secretary of state.
Clinton said she turned over the same number of emails she erased, though reiterating that the deleted emails were personal and not work related.
“In consultation with the National Archives and Records Administration, the Department also conducted a page-by-page review of the documents to identify, designate, mark, and inventory entirely personal correspondence, i.e., those documents that are not federal records, included within the 55,000 pages,” Hackett wrote.
Judge Rudolph Contreras, who is overseeing the Vice News lawsuit, will decide whether or not to accept the State Department’s January 2016 proposal. Other judges are overseeing several other lawsuits pertaining to Clinton’s emails as secretary of state, too.
(h/t Politico)
