A federal judge has ordered the State Department to begin delivering some emails uncovered by the FBI in its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server by September 13.
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The order is limited to documents related to the Benghazi attacks. A federal judge ruled on Friday that Clinton will have to submit written answers under oath and within 30 days to questions by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that is playing out in Washington, D.C.’s U.S. District Court.
Lawyers for the State Department and Judicial Watch had been negotiating before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C., on a plan for the release of the emails in installments between September 30 and October 31.
Earlier this week, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that the agency had agreed to hand over emails sent or received by Ms. Clinton in her official capacity as secretary from 2009 to 2013, but that it would take time for the thousands of documents to be “carefully appraised at State” to separate official records from personal ones.
The newest batch of emails includes messages Clinton did not voluntarily turn over to the State Department previous year but that were uncovered by the FBI during its investigation into her use of a private email server.
Instead, it was recently announced that the FBI recovered a total of about 14,900 emails during its yearlong investigation of Clinton, including the “several thousand work-related emails” that Comey cited in July. However, he did not recommend criminal charges, and the Justice Department closed the case.
It’s unclear how numerous new 14,900 are work-related, or if the agency will be able to release all relevant emails before Election Day.
Trump also suggested that Clinton intentionally deleted emails to “cover up her crimes”.
– The FBI recently discovered an additional 15,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. Our assessment is that, like many email users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails or emails were purged from the system when devices were changed.
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However, the email issue has continued to dog her presidential campaign, with Republican rival Donald Trump commenting on her email use frequently on the campaign trail. “At this time, we have not confirmed that the documents are, in fact, responsive”.
