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Hillary Clinton

Judge orders monthly release of Clinton emails

William Cummings
USA TODAY
Democratic presidential hopeful and former secretary of State, Hillary Clinton meets with parents and child care workers at the Center for New Horizons on May 20, 2015 in Chicago.

A federal judge has ordered the State Department to release emails from the private account of former secretary of State Hillary Clinton in batches every 30 days beginning June 30.

The State Department had offered to produce the emails every 60 days.

Under the order, the last of the emails will be released at the end of January.

The Wednesday court order is in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Jason Leopold of Vice News, which sought the release of all of Clinton's emails, along with other documents, from her tenure as secretary of State.

The State Department says there are about 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the agency from her private account, which it needs to review before making public. Nearly 300 emails related to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead were released last Friday.

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Clinton has been heavily criticized for conducting government business on a private email account, a practice which was discouraged by the Obama administration.

Several Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who chairs the House committee investigating Benghazi, argue that because Clinton used a private email server, she could have removed any damaging emails before handing them over to the State Department.

"The Department is keenly aware of the intense public interest in the documents and wants to get releasable materials out as soon as possible," the Justice Department lawyers representing State wrote in the department's Tuesday proposal.

Initially, the State Department proposed releasing all 55,000 pages of emails only after a compete review had been conducted, with a proposed release date of Jan. 15, 2016. In that proposal, the agency laid out a procedure to review, and where necessary redact, the emails at a pace of roughly 1,000 per week.

The order by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras offers specific targets for the percentage of total email pages that shall be released at each monthly deadline. In addition, the judge ordered, "If, in any given month, the (Department) fails to meet the above-referenced production goal, it shall explain in detail ... how it intends to catch up with the schedule by adding resources or otherwise."

Contributing: Paul Singer

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