Judge rejects mass release of Clinton’s private emails

WASHINGTON— Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails must be made public on a rolling basis, not released en masse in January, a U.S. federal judge ruled, rejecting a government proposal for releasing about 55,000 pages of the correspondence early next year.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered the State Department to update the status of document production every 60 days as it releases emails from former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton and to propose a deadline for making public any of Clinton’s emails related to the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton, who announced her bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination last month, is facing scrutiny for exclusively using a private email account while secretary of state. Campaigning in Iowa Tuesday, she said she wants the emails released as soon as possible but put the onus on the State Department.

“They’re not mine,” she said. “They belong to the State Department.”

The emails, handled on her private server and provided to the agency in December by Clinton, must undergo an internal review before they can be released, the State Department said in a federal court filing on Monday in response to a public records request by Jason Leopold, a contributor to Vice News.

The agency had asked the court to set a proposed completion date of Jan. 15, 2016. Instead, Contreras, in an order posted on the case docket, called for “a new production schedule for the Secretary Clinton emails that accounts for rolling production.”

The State Department said it will comply with the ruling, but a spokesman cautioned that the release of 30,000 emails totalling 55,000 pages of documents will require co-ordination with other agencies.

“We will come up with a schedule for rolling production,” State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters at a briefing in Washington on Tuesday.

The judge, an appointee of President Barack Obama, gave the State Department until May 26 to come up with a plan.

The State Department says it has already responded to the Republican-led House committee’s request, having submitted, in February, 296 emails deemed relevant to its investigation.