State Dept. to comply with court order on Hillary Clinton's emails
The State Department indicated Tuesday that it would comply with a court order to provide rolling production of some 55,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state, with the Benghazi -related emails to be released first.
Within a week, the State Department will also provide a timeline for the release of all Clinton's emails on a rolling basis.
The original plan proposed by the State Department in a court filing Monday night was to provide the entire cache in bulk by Jan. 15, 2016, two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. However, the judge in the case, Rudolph Contreras, issued an order Tuesday calling for the rolling production and release of the emails. He also ordered a new production schedule and updates from counsel every 60 days.
In addition, Judge Contreras ordered a specific deadline for the production of emails related to the 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi. The order to produce the emails is a response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Vice News' Jason Leopold.
Clinton was in charge of the State Department during the December 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.
Leopold requested every record from the State Department pertaining to Clinton. The FOIA office in the State Department, according to the filing, says that there have been 14,000 FOIA requests since Oct. 2014, and there are 63.5 employees addressing those requests.
In December, Clinton provided the State Department with copies of 30,000 emails, a total of 55,000 pages of documents, in response to a record keeping request from State.
The brief filed by the State Department Monday described the process, saying that the project of reviewing the Clinton emails is being staffed by a project manager, two case analysts and nine FOIA reviewers who have met every day since early April and have been spending all of their time on processing each page of the documents.
