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Judge tells State Department to release Clinton emails in batches

Judge tells State Department to release Clinton emails in batches

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That news this morning about Hillary Clinton's private email server, which she used instead of an official State Department address? That the department would be releasing 55,000 pages of her emails in January of 2016? That may no longer be true. Vice News, which previously filed a FOIA request for the emails, now reports that Judge Rudolph Contreras of the DC District Court has ordered the State Department to create a schedule to release the emails on a rolling basis.

They'll also have to set a specific date for the emails relating to the 2012 attacks on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya — a major point of contention between Clinton and some Congressional Republicans; this could reportedly happen within "days or weeks."

This won't necessarily entail a huge shift in the schedule. According to Vice, the government has argued that a rolling schedule will slow down their efforts to review the documents for release, and Contreras said that it would result in a "slight change;" the government will have to provide a new proposal by May 26th. The biggest distinction is that where the emails would previously have been released in bulk on a public website, the rolling schedule would release them directly to news organizations that filed FOIA requests — which, of course, still probably means everyone else will get to see them.