The State Department on Friday released 562 of Hillary Clinton’s official emails as secretary of state, bringing the department closer to the scheduled final production at the end of the month.
The release — part of a U.S. District Court judge’s order to make public the remaining 5,500 pages of Clinton’s emails before the end of the month — comes one day before voters in Nevada will participate in the Democratic caucuses, where Clinton is in a dead heat with opponent Bernie Sanders.
Sixty-four of the newly released emails, which are heavily redacted, were upgraded to “confidential” — the lowest level of classified information. These classifications bring the total number of upgraded emails to 1,752 out of the approximately 27,500 emails the State Department has released since last May.
Clinton’s practice of maintaining a private email server to conduct official State Department business has been under heavy scrutiny since the server was revealed early last year.
In the aftermath of that revelation, Clinton called on the State Department to publicly release her emails, and has insisted none of the information she sent or received was marked as classified at the time.
But retroactive classifications — including 22 upgrades to “top secret” — have caused critics to question Clinton’s assertion.
The State Department announced last month it is conducting a review into whether the information in Clinton’s emails was classified during her tenure, but has called the classification up to this point “retroactive.” The FBI is conducting a separate probe over how information was handled regarding her server.
