The State Department asked a federal court Friday for a one-month extension to publish the last of Hillary Clinton’s emails during her time as secretary of state.
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A government attorney was expected to file a motion in federal court on behalf of the State Department Friday, asking for an extra month to review and release the last batch of Clinton’s emails, Vice News reported. “I think it is fair to ask how many more extensions is State going to seek, and what’s in the remaining emails that requires so much more time to review and release them?” Both the State Department and Clinton’s presidential campaign insist that nothing in Clinton’s inbox was classified at the time it was sent, but only became classified after the fact. Because the Clinton email team must perform its work onsite… this storm will disrupt the Clinton email team’s current plans to work a significant number of hours throughout the upcoming weekend and could affect the number of documents that can be produced on January 29, 2016.
The intelligence community has also said that two of Clinton’s emails contained information that was classified as “top secret” when they were sent to her personal email account.
More than 1,300 of those emails have been partly redacted in the public release because the State Department says they contain classified information.
State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner said State will release as many emails as possible on January 29th and will release the rest at the end of February if the court grants its request.
In its request for extension, the State Department’s lawyers say an oversight by their own reviewers is partially to blame for the delay, because a “number of pages” that required additional review by the interagency team were never actually sent out for review. “Such protection may include heightened “need to know” requirements, cover measures, and other steps”, said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. Clinton says she did nothing wrong. Moreover, the processing of her emails by the State Department has helped expose the disastrous FOIA operations there under Clinton’s leadership.
A little more than 80 percent of the roughly 30,000 work emails Clinton returned to the State Department in 2014 have now been made public after Jason Leopold, a reporter for VICE News, sued the department under freedom of information laws.
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“State Department staff have been working extremely hard to process these emails and we are committed to getting them out”, Toner said. The agency fell several thousand pages short of the 8,800 page goal that the judge set for last month’s release. So far, it has released 43,148 pages of emails.
