State Department releases more than 1,900 Clinton emails

The State Department released 3,000 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton's tenure as the country's chief diplomat on Tuesday, in compliance with a judge's order to make the documents public.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered the State Department to release emails from the former secretary of State's private account every 30 days beginning June 30. The last batch of emails will be released in January 2016.

Initially, the State Department had requested to release all the emails at once in January of next year.

The batch of emails released Tuesday were sent between March and December 2009, her first year as secretary of State. Many of the emails are heavily redacted.

Clinton's State Department emails have become a campaign issue since it was revealed she had used a private email server to conduct government business, a practice that was discouraged by the Obama administration at the time. Critics have implied Clinton used the private server to avoid transparency and scrutiny.

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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.

Nearly 300 emails related to the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, were made public in May.

Clinton's office says she has given the State Department about 30,000 emails from a private server, roughly half of the 62,000 sent during her time as secretary of State. They rest she deemed personal and they were deleted.

The State Department says says all the emails must be reviewed and vetted before being made public.

The emails range in content from a debate about whether or not to call a "Karzai" — presumably Afghan President Hamid Karzai — to who will do Clinton's hair and makeup for an interview with Lisa Ling.

In one email, Clinton responds to a request from David Axelrod, a senior White House advisor at the time, for her email address.

"Does he know I can't look at it all day so he needs to contact me thru you or Huma or Lauren during work hours," Clinton tells her chief of staff Cheryl Mills.

Axelrod said in a June 17 interview that he did not know Clinton had used a private email account.