The timing is bad for Hillary Clinton.
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Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement released Friday, “It is unacceptable that the State Department is now refusing to release her official schedule before the election in full”.
This week, the GOP seemed to focus a little less on Hillary Clinton’s emails and a lot more on her schedule from her time as secretary of state.
The order came after the Federal Bureau of Investigation gave the department a disc earlier this month containing 14,900 emails to and from Ms Clinton and other documents it said it had recovered that she did not return to the government.
The department has so far released about half of the schedules.
The FBI has not said specifically where all the emails were found, but has said some were discovered by searching government archives of other federal employees who Clinton emailed. “We are not sure what additional materials the Justice Department may have located, but if the State Department determines any of them to be work-related, then obviously we support those documents being released publicly as well”.
The release is part of a Freedom of Information Act request, and the State Department has basically conceded it’s struggling to fulfill not just this request but FOIA requests of all kinds. Powell, of course, has since stated that he has no recollection of the conversation with Clinton.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton thanked a Florida judge overseeing the lawsuit for ordering the State Department to comply and release the emails in a timely fashion.
The State Department said it was proceeding as quickly as it could. It may also turn out that some of these documents were already released.
A State Department spokeswoman, Elizabeth Trudeau, declined to discuss the ongoing case and noted the agency is struggling with thousands of public records requests. She said she also deleted another 30,000 that she considered personal, The Hill noted.
The State Department has for months released regular batches of Hillary Clinton’s daily meeting schedules from her time as Secretary of State, but it has now said that not all the schedules would be released by the time the election rolls around.
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“It is astonishing that Hillary Clinton tried to delete and hide Benghazi emails and documents”.
