State Dept. to release first batch of Clinton emails recovered by FBI

The State Department is scheduled on Friday to release the first batch of emails to or from Hillary Clinton that were recovered by the FBI during the course of its yearlong investigation.

Under a court order last month, the department agreed to process at least 350 pages of Clinton’s emails by the end of the day Friday.

{mosads}It’s unclear how many of those pages will be released to the public, given the likelihood that some of them are purely personal and do not fall under the scope of federal open records laws. The State Department has previously claimed that half of the work-related emails given to it by the FBI were essentially duplicates of emails that have already been released.

Yet the release is likely to reignite the furor over the former secretary of State’s private email server, which has proven to be a deep vulnerability for her Democratic presidential campaign.

Previous batches of Clinton’s emails released by the State Department have contained nuggets of news that have captured headlines and, at times, offered revealing or embarrassing material.

The new emails are from the roughly 15,000 messages that FBI investigators uncovered while investigating whether Clinton or any of her aides at the State Department mishandled classified information. The Justice Department ultimately decided not to press charges in that case, though it did hand the new emails over to the State Department for the purposes of record-keeping and to comply with transparency laws.

One year after leaving the State Department, Clinton returned approximately 30,000 emails from her private system to the State Department. Another similarly sized collection of messages, which Clinton and her team have claimed contained purely personal notes, was deleted.

Last month, in a case brought by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, a federal judge ordered the State Department to begin reviewing the new emails and hand them over starting Friday. Subsequent batches are scheduled to be handed over to the public on Oct. 21 and Nov. 4, and every month after that.

In a separate case, the government agreed to process an additional 1,850 pages of emails by Nov. 3.