State Department asks for more time to release Hillary Clinton's emails
The State Department is asking for an additional month to finish processing and releasing Hillary Clinton's emails from her tenure as secretary of state.
The department is under a court order to release her emails on a monthly basis to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request. It was slated to finish releasing all 55,000 pages of emails by Jan. 29, and the department "will strive to produce as many documents as possible on that day," State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said Friday in a statement. However, the department says it will need until Feb. 29 to finish the job.
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The remaining emails are "the most complex to process as they contain a large amount of material that required interagency review," Toner said. "The cause of this delay is not due to any ongoing discussion about classification that has been in the news as of late."
The department is still slated to release a batch of Clinton's emails as planned at the end of January.
Since last year, Clinton has been under fire for using a private email account and private server to conduct business, rather than an official State Department address. Questions remain about the nature of emails in her account that were labeled as "classified." Clinton's private email server contained some information that was classified at a higher level than "top secret," the inspector general of the intelligence community told members of Congress.
While many emails were labeled as classified, that does not indicate that the information in them was classified at the time Clinton sent or received them. Even so, the GOP has slammed Clinton for keeping those emails on her private server. Meanwhile, the FBI is still probing whether State Department officials improperly included classified material in email correspondence with Clinton.
