More than 1,200 emails that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department are personal and not part of the federal record, the government’s chief records officer ruled.
The State Department asked the National Archives and Records Administration to review 1,246 emails the State Department identified as personal in nature.
“The goal of this review was to validate that the department correctly applied federal statutes, regulations and guidelines in identifying the personal correspondence of the former secretary,” Paul Wester, chief records officer for the U.S. government, wrote to the State Department earlier this month.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the first set of Clinton emails — those pertaining to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi — would be released “very, very soon.”
The records administration reviewed the documents using federal standards that define personal files as “documentary materials belonging to an individual that are not used to conduct agency business.”
The determination means the State Department will not make the emails public, spokesman Alec Gerlach told CNN.
The more than 1,200 personal emails were part of a bigger cache of roughly 30,000 emails from her personal server that Clinton turned over to the State Department last year.
The disclosure earlier this year that the Democratic presidential candidate used a personal server to do government business sparked a firestorm because the arrangement gave her sole control over official records.
Clinton has called on the State Department to publicly release her emails expeditiously.
“I have said repeatedly I want those emails out,” Clinton said earlier this week. “Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do.”
It is unlikely Clinton would choose to publicly release the 1,246 emails now deemed personal. The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.