The State Department has agreed to process thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails that were recovered by the FBI in time for the general elections.
Under a plan submitted to a federal judge late on Wednesday, the department promised to review at least 1,850 pages of emails that had been deleted from Clinton’s private server.
{mosads}That comes on top of the 1,050 pages that the department had already been ordered to process by a federal judge in another case last week.
The department is now expected to examine nearly 3,000 pages of new Clinton emails in time for the Nov. 8 elections.
It’s unclear precisely how many of those pages will ultimately be made public, given the odds that some of the message contain personal information unrelated to Clinton’s role as secretary of State. But the looming release of some of those pages is nonetheless sure to act as a reminder of the controversy surrounding Clinton’s email setup.
Clinton and her team deleted roughly half of the 60,000 emails on her private server before giving the material to the State Department for safekeeping in 2014. During its investigation into whether Clinton or her aides violated laws to protect classified information, the FBI was able to recover roughly half of those deleted emails.
State Department lawyers claimed last week that just over one-third of the new emails were deemed work-related, but many of those were copies of the tens of thousands of previously released emails.
The latest agreement comes in a court case launched by Vice journalist Jason Leopold. Lawyers for Leopold and the Obama administration were given until Wednesday to hammer out a deal for how to manage the release of the 15,000 new emails discovered by the FBI during the course of its yearlong investigation into Clinton. Leopold’s lawyers said before a federal judge last week that they were willing to have the State Department reallocate resources away from other pending open records requests and toward the FBI-recovered emails.
The previous demand that the department examine roughly 1,000 pages of emails came in a separate case launched by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog organization.