State Dept. breaks judge’s deadline on Clinton emails

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times
 
The State Department broke a judge’s order on the number of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails it was supposed to release Thursday, blaming the holiday season for throwing it off track.

The department promised another release of emails next week to make up for its breach, and said even the emails it was releasing Thursday will not be fully processed and won’t be able to be sorted by senders or recipients in the department’s computer system.

“We have worked diligently to come as close to the goal as possible, but with the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule we have not met the goal this month. To narrow that gap, the State Department will make another production of former Secretary Clinton’s email sometime next week,” the department said in a statement.
It’s the latest embarrassment for the department, which has repeatedly struggled to handle the more than 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton returned to the government nearly two years after she left office.

The department is under a federal court order to release emails every month since the summer, but broke the order by missing the first deadline under that order. It had caught up, but has now fallen behind again.

All told, some 5,500 pages of documents will be released later Thursday. It’s not clear yet how many actual individual emails that works out to, since many of them span multiple pages.