When will State Dept. release Hillary Clinton's emails?

The State Department intends to release tens of thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails just before the Iowa Caucuses, according to a filing submitted Monday, reports CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan.

The State Department, responding to a FOIA by Vice News' Jason Leopold, submitted to a District Court, said, "The Department plans to produce releasable portions of Secretary Clinton's emails, via the Department's production of the emails to the public on its FOIA website, by January 15, 2016."

A State Department official told CBS News the nearly 300 emails that were handed over to the House Select Committee on Benghazi will be made public "soon" and well ahead of that 2016 deadline.

Clinton was in charge of the State Department during the December 2012 attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

Leopold requested every record from State that pertained 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 - 55,000 pages of documents, in response to a record keeping request from State.

The department's brief 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.

CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan contributed to this report.