Government lawyers also said Friday that Clinton’s emails average 1.8 pages per record.
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Most of the emails the FBI recovered during its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system while secretary of state will not be made available until after the November 8 presidential election under a timetable set by a judge on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported.
That means the majority of messages recovered during an FBI investigation into Clinton’s classified email scandal won’t see the light of day until well after Americans pick a new president, raising the possibility that an “October surprise” might pop up in December or January.
The court ordered State to process the first 350 pages of documents by October 7, the second 350 pages by October 21, and the third by November 4. He originally gave them a September 23 deadline, but acknowledged today that the department “was struggling to manage the burden of dozens of lawsuits and thousands of requests for records from Mrs. Clinton’s time in office”. After that, the officials will “process 500 pages of the remaining documents per month until all have been released”.
The judge said it was “unrealistic” to review the 5,600 messages in the next six weeks-a task sought by the conservative watchdog group that had initially filed the lawsuit to obtain the former secretary of state’s records.
The witness said he and other career officers, who were typically involved in the FOIA process and in responding to congressional inquiries, were “cut out of the loop” when Clinton’s emails needed processing.
The former secretary of state gave the agency roughly 55,000 pages of her emails in December 2014.
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State Department spokesman John Kirby insisted to the Journal on Friday that numerous newly recovered email conversations consisted of message threads that originally included Clinton but later dropped her from discussion. The paper said that material was out of what could be as much as 10,000 pages. US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton forgot classified documents at a hotel in Russian Federation during a trip as secretary of state, documents released by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation show, Sputnik News reported.
