The State Department says all of the potential secret information in former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails has knocked them off pace, and told a federal judge late Friday that’s why the department is currently in violation of his orders.
John F. Hackett, the top open records officer for the department, said the government belatedly realized all of the potentially classified information in Mrs. Clinton’s communications and, prodded by two watchdogs, realized they needed to be running her emails by intelligence officers to make sure they weren’t giving out secrets.
The department was supposed to have released 15 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s emails by the end of July, but had released less than 12 percent — some 1,721 pages shy of the goal set out by Judge Rudolph Contreras earlier this year.
Mrs. Clinton and her allies had repeatedly insisted she didn’t transact any classified business on her email account, which she issued to herself on a private server she kept at her home in New York rather than using an official secure State Department account.
But an inspector general says there was information that should have been classified at the time Mrs. Clinton was sending it, and now that the emails are being released per Judge Contreras’s orders, the State Department is having to go through and redact all of that information.
All of Mrs. Clinton’s messages are government records and should have been stored at the State Department so they could be searched under open records laws.
Her unique arrangement meant that, for six years, those messages weren’t part of the record, and the State Department was not able to conduct a full, responsive search.
Prodded by the investigation into the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, the State Department belatedly demanded Mrs. Clinton return her emails to the department, and she complied in Dec. 2014, or nearly two years after she left office, turning over 55,000 pages, constituting about 30,000 messages.
She said she expunged another 32,000 messages that were purely private, and says she is now in compliance with the law.
She has refused to turn over her server, saying it would be pointless because she has wiped it clean of the emails anyway.
Mr. Hackett said he thinks they can make up the 1,700-page deficit over the next two months, releasing 6,106 pages of emails in August and another 7,156 in September.
That will still leave more than 60 percent of the messages to come from October through January — the deadline when Judge Contreras has ordered all 30,000 messages to be public.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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