The State Department published 3,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails late Tuesday in the first of eight court-ordered releases of the former secretary of state’s work-related records.
The agency posted the emails on its Freedom of Information Act website, as it did with the 296 emails related to Benghazi and Libya that were made public last month.
The emails, which are from between March 2009 and December 2009, make up just seven percent of the 55,000 pages of emails Clinton turned over at the State Department’s request in December.
The State Department is publishing them now on the order of U.S. District Court judge Rudolph Contreras, who made the ruling in response to a lawsuit from Vice News. The news outlet filed the suit because a Freedom of Information Act request its reporter, Jason Leopold, filed for Clinton’s emails but was denied by the State Department. The agency issued the denial, claiming that Clinton emails did not exist. (RELATED: Judge Orders Hillary’s Emails Released In 8 Batches Every 30 Days)
Vice sued after it was revealed that Clinton flouted federal regulations and avoided having her emails made public through FOIA by using a personal email account to send and receive emails during her tenure at the State Department, which stretched from Jan. 21, 2009, to Feb. 1, 2013. It has not yet been explained whether the State Department knew of that private account when it denied several FOIA requests for her emails.
The remaining Clinton emails will come in seven more rounds. The State Department initially sought to for a Jan. 2016 release date for all of the records, but Contreras shot that idea down last month. Instead, the State Department must release a new batch of emails every 30 days until Jan. 29, 2016.
The release schedule is graduated, which means that a larger percentage of Clinton’s entire email trove will be made available each month. In July, the State Department must release eight percent of the emails. In August, another 10 percent will be released. Eighteen percent, or just under 10,000 pages of records, will be released in January.
Reporters, lawmakers and the general public will no doubt thoroughly comb the latest records dump.
Reporters will likely be looking for emails containing classified information as well as exchanges referring to Clinton’s family charity, the Clinton Foundation.
When Clinton defended her use of a private email account — which she said she did out of “convenience” — she emphatically stated that she did not send or receive classified documents. Having done so would open Clinton up to further scrutiny, and it would technically be illegal under federal law.
The records will likely also include exchanges referring to an embarrassing moment early in Clinton’s tenure as the nation’s top diplomat. March 2009 was the month that Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov infamously reset the relationship between the two great superpowers. Clinton literally presented Lavrov with a reset button, a small red button. The two pushed the button in tandem in order to symbolize a rekindled relationship.
Clinton’s emails with her tight circle of aides — Huma Abedin, Philippe Reines, and Cheryl Mills — will also be of great interest. Abedin maintained an account on the private email server Clinton maintained to host her personal account.