The good news: A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the U.S. State Department to produce a schedule for the release of emails that Hillary Clinton sent and received while she was secretary of state, a legal move that could complicate her presidential campaign.
The other news: The State Department is proposing a deadline of January 2016 to complete its review...
You just can't make this up!
As Reuters reports [6],
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the U.S. State Department to produce a schedule for the release of emails that Hillary Clinton sent and received while she was secretary of state, a legal move that could complicate her presidential campaign.
A lawyer in the case, Jeffrey Light, told Reuters that U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered the State Department to come up with a timetable by next week for the rolling release of the 55,000 pages of emails.
The judge also told the State Department to come up with a schedule by next week for releasing 300 Clinton emails related to U.S. operations in Benghazi, Libya where four American officials, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, were killed in a September 11, 2012 attack, Light said.
Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has come under criticism for storing and sending emails related to her official duties via a private server based in her house in New York state. She has now turned over the messages to the State Department.
But, as Politico reports, [7] don't expect justice any time soon...
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.
“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.
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Let's not forget, Hillary wants us to see her emails...
“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.
So don't blame her.
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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.
