Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top aides have belatedly turned over more than 100,000 pages of emails they had kept on personal email accounts, or accounts tied to Mrs. Clinton’s server, the government told a federal judge late Friday.
Huma Abedin turned over an estimated 23,000 pages of emails, Philippe Reines gave back 70,000 pages of messages and Cheryl Mills returned somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,870 pages, the Obama administration told Judge Rudolph Contreras in a court filing.
Unlike Mrs. Clinton’s emails, the State Department does not have plans to post online all of those three aides’ messages, instead deciding to release only selected messages that are requested through particular open-records demands.
The records from Ms. Abedin and Mr. Reines are all now in electronic format and can at least be searched, though it will still take some time to determine which of the messages contain classified information that must be redacted.
Ms. Mills returned some 3,000 pages of her records as printed pages, and those need to be processed still, the State Department said.
The messages came to light after it was discovered Mrs. Clinton used a non-State.gov account to conduct her business during her four years as secretary. Attention then turned to her aides, and it turned out they, too, did a lot of business on non-State.gov email accounts.
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Those messages have effectively been shielded from public scrutiny for years, in defiance of federal policies that discourage use of personal email accounts and insist that when they are used, all government-related business be forwarded to an official account for record-keeping.
Mrs. Clinton returned about 32,000 messages to the government in December. Ms. Mills didn’t return her last batch of messages until Aug. 12, and Ms. Abedin was even later, taking until Sept. 1 — or after the deadline the State Department had agreed to — to finally give back all of her government business messages.
Mr. Reines returned 70,000 pages of emails on July 28. But most of those are daily compilations of articles in the press related to State Department business. Excluding those, Mr. Reines has provided about 16,000 pages of new emails to the Department.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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