State Dept. releases 75 Clinton emails discovered by FBI

by Katie Bo Williams - 10/07/16 3:27 PM ET

The State Department on Friday released 75 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 75 documents — comprising about 270 pages — are “near duplicates” of documents that were provided to the State Department by Clinton in 2014 and have already been made public.

For example, several emails are identical to previously-released chains, but were forwarded from Clinton to aides with the note, “Please print.”

The documents comprise entirely 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 presidential election.

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.

The 270 pages produced Friday are the first batch, the result of a review of 350 total 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 Friday’s production and will not be re-released.

The release comes amidst the ongoing release of Clinton’s emails through various FOIA productions.

On Thursday, the Republican National Committee gave The Wall Street Journal emails it obtained through a FOIA lawsuit, revealing that communication officials in the Obama administration coordinated how to handle fallout from the email scandal before she launched her presidential campaign.

The occasional drip of minor revelations is expected to continue up until the Nov. 8 election.

State is scheduled to review 350 additional emails from the FBI files and publish what they are able to on Oct. 21 and Nov. 4. Thereafter, the agency will review 500 pages a month, producing as many responsive documents as exist in each batch.

Tags Hillary Clinton