The State Department has requested a Jan. 2016 deadline to release the tens of thousands of pages of emails turned over by the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from email correspondence conducted on her own private servers while she was in office. The news comes in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit filed by Vice News, Politico reports. The proposed State Department deadline falls just two weeks before the Iowa caucus on Feb. 1, 2016.
Here’s more from Politico:
“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…
Hackett said 12 State staffers have been assigned full-time to reviewing the Clinton emails and that it took until sometime this month to scan in the records, which were provided on paper by Clinton in 12 “banker’s boxes” in December. He said the scanning process took five weeks and was “complicated” by some of the printouts of Clinton emails being double-sided.
As Politico points out, if the State Department’s timeframe is agreed to, that would mean more than a year would have passed since Clinton handed over the emails and they were made public.
