News broke Monday that the State Department had proposed releasing a vetted archive of Hillary Clinton’s email correspondence from her time as secretary of state in January 2016. On Tuesday a judge rejected that proposal and ordered that the emails be released on a “rolling production” schedule—that is, in batches, as soon as they’re ready. From Politico:
At a brief hearing on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Vice News, [Judge] Contreras did not set a specific date by which State must begin releasing the emails.
However, the judge gave the government one week to provide a schedule for the periodic release of records, Vice News lawyer Jeffrey Light said after the session.
Clinton ignored official guidelines by using a private email account for her work at State; the explanations she’s given for why she was justified in doing so have been unpersuasive, and the system she said she used for determining which of the private emails constituted “official business” and were ultimately turned over for release seems to have been imprecise. Meanwhile, ongoing reporting on an unofficial Clinton adviser and aspiring Libya-reconstruction entrepreneur named Sidney Blumenthal suggests that her email record might end up documenting exactly the kind of conflict-of-interest problems that critics have said she is susceptible to.
