The FBI turned over “thousands of documents” to the State Department recovered during their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, a court filing in a civil case involving the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch revealed Friday.
The FBI was expected to turn over the documents once their investigation concluded so that State could use them for their internal investigation. The FBI plans to turn over on August 5 more emails they recovered.
State is expected to sort through the documents and determine which are personal and which are considered “agency records.”
The State Department has not indicated whether it will release all of the “agency records” to the public, but will release relevant emails from this batch as part of specific Freedom of Information Act requests.
“Just as we appropriately processed the material turned over to the Department by former Secretary Clinton, we will appropriately and with due diligence process any additional material we receive from the FBI to identify work-related agency records and make them available to the public consistent with our legal obligations,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.
The news comes several weeks after the agency recommended against charges for Clinton over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and the same week Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination at her party’s convention in Philadelphia.
While Clinton avoided legal charges, she was sharply and publicly criticized by FBI director James Comey for her private server use and her treatment of classified information, which he described as “extremely careless.”
The State Department released most of the emails turned over by Clinton at her request, according to a timeline set by a federal judge in a separate lawsuit.
This first batch of emails turned over by the FBI includes the bulk of the emails sent and received by Clinton, while the batch they plan to turn over next week contains other documents found on the server, as well as the emails of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, who also had an account on the server.