State releases new batch of Clinton emails
The State Department on Friday released 112 of the 15,000 Hillary Clinton emails uncovered by the FBI during its investigation into the former secretary of State’s personal email server.
{mosads}Many of the documents — comprising about 240 pages — are “near duplicates” of documents Clinton provided to the State Department in 2014 and have already been made public, according to the agency.
A “near duplicate,” according to the agency, would include emails identical to previously released chains that were forwarded from Clinton to aides with the note, “Please print,” for example.
The newly released documents are records of emails sent or received by Clinton directly in her official capacity as secretary of State and were expected to largely concern scheduling matters.
The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch has been pushing for all of the documents to be released before the Democratic presidential nominee faces voters on Nov. 8
A federal judge last month ordered the State Department to review approximately 1,000 pages of the documents before Nov. 8, releasing in batches those that are subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that is driving their release.
Friday’s is the second batch. The Department made public 75 emails, or around 270 pages, on Oct. 7, many of which were also “near duplicates” and contained little new information.
Each batch is the result of a review of 350 pages ordered by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.
Clinton deleted about 30,000 emails from the private server setup she used while serving as secretary of State, saying they were not work-related, before turning over thousands more to the government. But while examining her machines, the FBI recovered some additional emails that could be relevant to the FOIA lawsuit.
A preliminary review of the 15,000 emails revealed that about 60 percent were of a purely personal nature. Around 37 percent — or 5,600 documents — were deemed work-related, but of those, a “substantial number” were exact duplicates of the 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over to the agency in December 2014, according to State Department lawyers.
Those emails are excluded from each production and will not be re-released.
At the same time, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks has published thousands of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal account.
The occasional minor revelation is expected to continue up until the Nov. 8 elections.
State officials are scheduled to review 350 additional emails from the FBI files and publish what they are able to on Nov. 3 and Nov. 4. Thereafter, the agency will review 500 pages a month, producing as many relevant documents as exist in each batch.
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