A new batch of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails will be released on June 30, according to new court documents.
Justice Department lawyers on Tuesday night filed a notice for scheduling the release of approximately 30,000 emails, comprising of 55,000 pages, that former Secretary of State Clinton provided to the State Department, in response to a federal court order.
“The department proposes that it make its next production of non-exempt portions of the emails by posting them on the website on June 30, 2015, and that it make rolling productions in the same way every 60 days thereafter,” said Benjamin C. Mizer, principal deputy assistant attorney general, in court papers.
The lawyer noted that the State Department had already produced 296 emails responsive to the House Select Committee on Benghazi on May 22.
“The department will strive to produce as many documents as possible on each production date, and will file a status report one week after each production to inform the court of the number of pages posted,” the filing said.
Mizer wrote that the department is “keenly aware of the intense public interest” in the documents and is “committed to reallocating further resources to accommodate the additional effort required by rolling productions so that it can still complete the production on or before the department’s initial proposed deadline of January 15, 2016.”
Last week, federal Judge Rudolph Contreras, of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, asked the government to propose a schedule involving the release of documents on a rolling basis. Contreras is hearing a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by journalist Jason Leopold of Vice News.
Leopold’s lawyer, Ryan James, issued a statement on Tuesday night praising the June 30 date, but not the 60 day break between releases.
“I applaud State’s proposal to begin releasing Clinton’s emails on June 30, 2015, but I do not believe that additional rolling productions every 60 days is sufficiently frequent to enable the public to engage in fully informed discussion about Secretary Clinton’s leadership style and decisions while at the helm of the State Department,” he said.
In an interview, he said he would file a response Tuesday night seeking the rolling production every two weeks beginning June 30, 2015, and ending no later than January 31, 2016, “to ensure as much information as possible is accessible to the public as quickly as possible, and before caucusing begins February 1, 2016.”
The court will take the orders under consideration.