Hillary Clinton talks emails and judge orders faster release
The State Department confirmed on Tuesday that they are releasing the Hillary Clinton emails to the public from during her time as secretary of state, while a federal judge ordered up a plan for a rolling release of these hotly anticipated documents.
“Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do,” Clinton said to reporters while on the campaign trail.
The 55,000 pages of emails have become the source of much speculation and now bureaucratic man-hours since news emerged earlier this year that Clinton used a private email server during her time as secretary of state.
The controversy has complicated Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid and played into criticism that she and her husband are unduly secretive.
The State Department on Monday night proposed a deadline of January 2016 to complete its review and publicly release the whole set of documents, but a federal judge on Tuesday rejected such a plan.
U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras on Tuesday said in a written order State must propose a new schedule by next Tuesday that involves disclosing the records batch-by-batch on a regular basis and updating the court every 60 days on the releases.
“Anything that they might do to expedite that process I heartily support,” she said to reporters after a roundtable in Cedar Falls, Iowa. “I want the American people to learn as much as they can about the work I did with our diplomats and our development experts.”
“The State Department has to go through its process, but as much as they can expedite the process, that’s what I’m asking them to do.”
State spokesman Jeff Rathke said Tuesday that the agency will abide by the judge’s order.
“I don’t have anything to add to what was in the court papers,” Rathke told reporters at a daily briefing. “Clearly, the court has issued an order, and we’ll comply with it.”
Asked if State was “slow-rolling” release of the records, Rathke said, “No.”
“We have a large volume of records that cover the entire span of Secretary Clinton’s time at the department. I’m sure you could imagine this would cover pretty much any topic. It could cover any topic on our foreign policy agenda,” Rathke said.
“If certain things were released early and there were other records pertinent to the same topic that that might not have been finally processed, there was a desire to do them all at once so they’d be processed in their entirety.”
The emails have also been a subject of intense interest from a House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, and documents unearthed as part of that probe have slowly leaked out.
