The State Department’s release Thursday of Hillary Clinton emails will fall thousands of pages short of a schedule laid out by a federal judge earlier this year, the agency announced.
The State Department said in a statement Thursday that it will release 5,500 pages of Clinton emails later in the day. That’s compared to 7,800 pages of records that were released last month and 7,000 pages that were published in October.
In May, federal judge Rudolph Contreras ordered the State Department to release its 55,000 pages of Clinton emails on a graduated schedule at the end of each month through Jan. 2016. Contreras’ schedule required State to release 16 percent of Clinton’s emails — or 8,800 pages’ worth — this month, putting the agency six percent shy of its court-ordered goal.
Claiming that the shortfall is due to the “large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule,” State says it will attempt to compensate with another release sometime next week.
Thursday’s document dump will be lacking in other ways as well. State says that in its scramble to produce as many Clinton emails as possible, it was unable to complete data fields for the emails on its Freedom of Information Act website. The website usually lists each email’s “subject” line, as well as the “to” and “from” sections. State hopes to make that data available next month. The emails will still be searchable by keyword, as have all other releases.
The shortfall comes even as the State Department has hired dozens of staffers to help with the increased workload that has followed the discovery of Clinton’s personal email account. The New York Times reported in March that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account as secretary of state. Several of Clinton’s top aides also used personal accounts for government business, in violation of federal regulations.
The suspicious nature of Clinton’s email setup — which involved the use of a private server that Clinton kept at her New York residence — sparked a number of new Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits. Contreras’ ruling pertains to a lawsuit filed by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold. The Daily Caller has also filed two lawsuits related to Clinton’s State Department records.