The State Department will release all of the work-related emails that the FBI recovered from Hillary Clinton’s private system, the department confirmed in a recent court filing, eliminating the possibility that the messages will remain secret.
However, it remains unsettled whether the full set of emails will be out before the presidential election on Nov. 8.
The thousands of messages will be released to Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that has filed numerous legal complaints over the former secretary of State’s email setup while in office, the department said. Judicial Watch, which routinely releases documents it obtains via open-records lawsuits, is expected to make the emails public.
{mosads}“State has voluntarily agreed to produce non-exempt agency records responsive to plaintiff’s [Freedom of Information Act] request,” the department said in a short filing on Friday.
The State Department has declined to set a timeline for releasing the emails, and a court conference to discuss the matter has been scheduled for Aug. 22. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has urged the department to release the emails before the November elections.
The State Department had been expected to release the emails, which are the subject of multiple open-records lawsuits, but the new confirmation assures that the full docket of emails will be handed over. The lawsuit seeks “any and all emails sent or received” by Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, while she served as the nation’s top diplomat.
“The American people will now see more of the emails Hillary Clinton tried to hide from them,” Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch’s president, said in a statement. “Simply put, our lawsuits have unraveled Hillary Clinton’s email cover-up.”
In 2014, Clinton gave the State Department roughly 30,000 emails from her private server, which she claimed were work-related. Another similar batch of emails was purely personal, she claimed at the time, and was deleted.
However, the FBI managed to recover some of those deleted emails during the course of its yearlong investigation into Clinton’s system and discovered “several thousand” that were work-related and ought to have been handed over to the State Department for record-keeping purposes. Three of those emails contained information that was classified, FBI Director James Comey told reporters last month.
The FBI finished transferring those messages back to the State Department this month.