State Department plans to release Hillary Clinton's emails in January 2016
By Josh Gerstein
| 5/18/15 10:50 PM EDT
| Updated 5/19/15 5:56 AM EDT
The State Department is proposing a deadline of January 2016 to complete its review and public release of 55,000 pages of emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exchanged on a private server and turned over to her former agency last December.
The proposal came Monday night in a document related to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit Vice News filed in January seeking all of Clinton’s emails.
“The Department’s plan … would result in its review being completed by the end of the year. To factor in the holidays, however, the Department would ask the Court to adopt a proposed completion date of January 15, 2016,” State’s acting director of Information Programs and Services John Hackett said in a declaration filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.
Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives at a house party to speak with local residents, Monday, May 18, 2015, in Mason City, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
“The Department understands the considerable public’s [sic] interest in these records and is endeavoring to complete the review and production of them as expeditiously as possible. The collection is, however, voluminous and, due to the breadth of topics, the nature of the communications, and the interests of several agencies, presents several challenges,” Hackett added.
The controversy over Clinton’s private email account led to a turbulent start for her presidential campaign, which she announced last month. She has said she wants the emails public and is eager for State to release them as quickly as possible. Clinton said she turned over all work-related emails to State, but acknowledged that she had erased a roughly equal number of emails her lawyers deemed private.
“I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible,” Clinton tweeted on March 4.
The State Department’s proposal, however, could mean a delay of almost 13 months between the time Clinton turned over some of her records and the bulk of those emails being made public.
Soon after the New York Times revealed in March that Clinton had exclusively used a private email account as secretary of state, State Department spokespeople repeatedly said that they expected the review of the Clinton records to take “several months.” They did not immediately respond to messages Monday night seeking an explanation of why that estimate was so off base.
Hackett said 12 State staffers have been assigned full-time to reviewing the Clinton emails and that it took until sometime this month to scan in the records, which were provided on paper by Clinton in 12 “banker’s boxes” in December. He said the scanning process took five weeks and was “complicated” by some of the printouts of Clinton emails being double-sided.
Hackett also disclosed that personnel from the National Archives have been helping State determine which of the emails Clinton delivered to her former agency are official and which are actually personal. State officials have said at least some of the emails she provided are clearly personal.
“In consultation with the National Archives and Records Administration, the Department also conducted a page-by-page review of the documents to identify, designate, mark, and inventory entirely personal correspondence, i.e., those documents that are not federal records, included within the 55,000 pages,” he wrote.
State Department officials have reaffirmed in recent weeks that they plan an earlier disclosure of a batch of the emails provided to a House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks. However, the department’s spokespeople have said only that the initial release will come “soon,” declining to be more specific about the timing of that first release.
Asked by POLITICO Friday when that Libya-related batch of records should emerge, State spokesman Jeff Rathke was vague. “I don’t have an update to share. But yes, we’re aware that there’s interest out there, certainly,” he said at a daily briefing for reporters.
State Department lawyers have complained in court of a “crushing burden” of FOIA requests as well as at least 79 FOIA lawsuits pending against the department. They have also cited the need to prioritize the Clinton email project as a reason for delays in other FOIA cases.
The Iowa caucuses are due to be held Feb. 1, 2016 — just two weeks after the proposed release of Clinton’s emails.
A Clinton campaign spokesman had no immediate comment Monday night on State’s proposal.
Whether to accept State’s proposal will be up to Judge Rudolph Contreras, who is overseeing the Vice News suit, as well as other judges overseeing several other cases seeking narrower slices of Clinton’s emails as secretary of state.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/state-department-wont-release-hillary-clintons-emails-until-january-2016-118078.html#ixzz3aa68b5Cg
