September 28, 2016 | No Comments
The State Department has agreed to process for public release in advance of the election almost 3,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails recovered by the FBI during their recently closed investigation into Clinton’s private server arrangement.
A federal judge previously ordered State to review 1,050 pages of the Clinton messages before the election. The deal that State and Vice News reporter Jason Leopold submitted to two other federal judges Wednesday will add 1,850 pages to those already scheduled for processing.
The release of the records seems certain to provide more unwelcome “drip, drip, drip” for the Clinton campaign, but many of the messages could emerge so close to the election that they’ll be caught up in the last-minute frenzy of coverage and back-to-back political events.
The new agreement calls for the releasable portion of the additional 1,850 pages to be made public on State’s website on Nov. 3. The existing schedule, in a case brought by conservative group Judicial Watch, calls for processing sets of 350 pages for posting on each of three days: Oct. 7, Oct. 21 and Nov. 4.
Negotiations toward the deal were first reported Monday by POLITICO. To strike the latest agreement, Leopold offered to defer receipt of other Clinton-related records State was under court order to review in a Freedom of Information Act suit he filed last year.
“Mr. Leopold is pleased he was able to offer a solution that will increase transparency in a victory for the voting public. Mr. Leopold sacrificed productions due to him regarding the aspect of his FOIA request seeking the records of Secretary Clinton’s top aides,” said Ryan James, an attorney for the journalist.
While State has now agreed to process 2,900 pages of the FBI-found emails by the election, far fewer than that may actually be made public by then. State officials have said their initial appraisal deemed about 5,600 messages sent over by the FBI to be work-related, which could amount to more than 10,000 pages. However, about half those messages could be duplicates and some could still be determined to be personal and withheld in their entirety.
The order proposed Wednesday also allows State to count toward its processed pages messages that are referred to other government agencies for review. In theory, State could produce or process more pages than the orders require, but the agency appears unlikely to overshoot by much given its complaints about strained resources.
The set of 54,000 pages of messages Clinton turned over to State in late 2014 was made public in a process that wound up in February of this year. The new messages were recovered by the FBI from various sources, including old computer equipment used by Clinton and her aides. Messages retained by others but not by Clinton are also believed to be part of the FBI collection.