Lawyers for the department told U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg on Monday that they anticipate processing and releasing the first batch of these new emails in mid-October, raising the prospect that new messages sent or received by Clinton could become public just before November’s election.
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As a result, thousands of emails that Clinton did not voluntarily turn over to the State Department previous year could be released just weeks before the election in November.
Congressional Republicans have issued subpoenas to three technology companies that either made or serviced the private email server that Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state.
FBI Director James Comey said last month that the agency had found what he described as “several thousand work-related emails” that were not among the 30,000 she had turned over from her time as secretary of state.
Boasberg is overseeing production of the emails as part of a federal public-records lawsuit filed by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch. “When will State release them?”
Judicial Watch’s lawsuit has continued to keep the Clinton email controversy alive after an FBI investigation was closed last month with a decision not to bring criminal charges against the Democratic nominee.
Powell, who served as the nation’s top diplomat from 2001-2005 under Republican president George W. Bush, told People magazine that while he did send Clinton a memo about his own email practices, Clinton had already chosen to use personal email rather than a government account while she had the job. Judicial Watch lawyer Lauren Burke called that schedule too slow and pressed for faster release of the emails from the first disc.
He also called for a special prosecutor to investigate his Democratic rival, accusing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department of a “whitewash” during their probe of her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. The judge ordered the department to focus its efforts on processing the emails from the first disk and to report back to him on its progress by September 22.
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The newly released email exchanges appeared to show that a rich donor, Casey Wasserman, asked Bill Clinton aide Doug Band to contact Abedin for help in setting up a meeting with diplomatic officials in London, which put a new focus on the sometimes awkward ties between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.
