Judge James Boasberg announced on Friday that the State Department doesn’t have to release all emails contained in the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails until after Election Day. 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.”
This batch includes the 15,000 emails the State Department miraculously found after the FBI finished its investigation into Hillary’s private email server. Officials originally said the disc contained 30 emails on Benghazi, but let everyone down when they only found one.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
The State Department says it has identified roughly 15,000 email messages to or from Mrs. Clinton that the FBI recovered and turned over to the State Department. Of those 15,000, about 9,400 have been deemed purely personal and will be excluded from release, according to lawyers representing the Department. Another 5,600 emails were deemed work-related but State Department attorneys warned that up to 50% of those are duplicates of emails that Mrs. Clinton already turned over.Department lawyers said they aren’t sure how many total pages the newly discovered emails comprise but that each email comprised on average about 1.8 pages, they said.
The department insisted to judges that officials needed until at least October 14 to sift through the emails. Boasberg now states the employees “must process 1,050 pages of emails between now and November 4, releasing any non-exempt documents aside from those that are determined to be duplicates of those already released.” The DOJ lawyer representing the State Department said that a “substantial number” in the batch include duplicates or near duplicates.
CNN reports that the department will begin production on October 7 and release emails on October 21 and November 4. After that, the officials will “process 500 pages of the remaining documents per month until all have been released.”
Judicial Watch has led the charge against Hillary and her private email server. The president of the organization expressed displeasure at the outcome:
After the judge’s order, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said that “the American people could be deprived of this information at this essential time.”“This is an absolutely corrupt process the State Department has come up with,” he said, blaming the department for the continuing delays.
The State Department only has to hand over the emails that fit into Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit:
The first batch of new emails comes in response to a court order issued today in a November 13, 2015, Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit filed against the Department of State seeking all communications between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House from the day of the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi and throughout the following week.—In a separate case, Judicial Watch has been seeking Clinton’s communications about the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, during which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith were killed. A second assault targeted a nearby compound, killing two government contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00692)).—Judicial Watch is also scheduled to receive documents from the State Department in a case arising out of FOIA lawsuit before Judge Emmet G. Sullivan that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton. The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system.
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