State Department Asks For More Time To Release Last Batch Of Hillary Emails
By Chuck Ross, Daily Caller, Jan. 22, 2016
The State Department is citing a snowstorm expected to hit Washington D.C. this weekend and a need for additional “interagency review” in its request to a federal judge on Friday to grant it an additional month to complete its final release of all of Hillary Clinton’s work-related emails.
Federal judge Rudolph Contreras ruled last year in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Vice News’ Jason Leopold that the State Department had to release Clinton’s 55,000 pages of emails on a graduated schedule at the end of each month through Jan. 2016.
But as first reported by Leopold — and as confirmed by The Daily Caller — the State Department’s attorneys filed a motion in court on Friday asking for the deadline to be pushed to Feb. 29.
“In this filing, the Department asked the Court for a one month extension, to February 29th, to finish our production of former Secretary Clinton’s emails,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said in a statement to TheDC.
The final tranche of Clinton’s emails, Toner said, are “the most complex to process” since they “contain a large amount of material that required interagency review.”
And the processing of the records will by slowed by a brutal snowstorm expected to incapacitate much of Washington D.C. this weekend, the State Department claims in its court filing.
Because the Clinton email team must perform its work onsite…this storm will disrupt the Clinton email team’s current plans to work a significant number of hours throughout the upcoming weekend and could affect the number of documents that can be produced on January 29, 2016,” the filing reads.
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