A District of Columbia judge ordered the State Department on Wednesday to release batches of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails every 30 days.
The State Department had requested a 60-day interval between email releases.
{mosads}District Judge Rudolph Contreras’s ruling stipulates that State must produce all non-exempt portions of Clinton’s government emails it possesses on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) website.
It orders State to release approximately 55,000 pages provided by Clinton by Jan. 29, 2016.
Contreras ordered the agency to start rolling posts on June 30 and then continue every 30 days thereafter, the ruling added.
He additionally provided State with a schedule for publishing each portion of the total messages.
State’s first release, Contreras ordered, must document seven percent or more of Clinton’s emails.
Contreras further charged that the agency must provide his court with a weekly progress report detailing the number of pages released from the cache.
Should State miss a release deadline, Contreras said, it must provide a strategy for catching up in its most recent weekly report.
Concerns over Clinton’s transparency while at State have dogged her Democratic presidential campaign since it launched on April 12.
At issue is the former secretary’s use of a personal email address for official government business.
Critics argue that Clinton’s ownership of a private email server prevents accountability for her official actions taken while at State.
Republicans are particularly concerned with her correspondences in the days following the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Four Americans – including Ambassador Chris Stevens – were killed at the consulate in Benghazi during a Sept. 11, 2012 attack by radical Islamists.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) ruled on May 22 that 1,246 of Clinton’s emails State possessed were “personal” and will not receive public release.
Clinton has called on State to speed up its review process of her communications.
“I want those emails out…anything they might do to expedite that process, I wholeheartedly support,” she said during an event at a Cedar Falls, Iowa bicycle shop on May 19.
“I want the American people to learn as much as they can about the work that I did.”