All of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails should be processed and released before the election, the Republican National Committee demanded Monday, after the Obama administration admitted it has obtained “tens of thousands” of messages Mrs. Clinton failed to turn over.
The RNC said the first of the messages should be released before early voting starts in any of the states — which would mean by the last week in September.
Obama administration officials, though, told a federal judge Monday they’ll take months to process emails, and saying it will take well beyond the election.
“The process for reviewing these emails needs to be expedited, public disclosure should begin before early voting starts, and the emails in question should be released in full before Election Day,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus demanded.
Mrs. Clinton used a secret email account tied to a server kept at her home in New York to conduct her State Department business, including handling of classified email. Her arrangement effectively shielded her communications from public view for up to six years, defying federal open-records laws.
After prodding from Congress’s investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attack, she finally returned some 30,000 messages to the government in December 2014, insisting those were all the messages she had access to that were work-related. She said she deleted some 30,000 messages that were purely private.
But the FBI did its own investigation and uncovered thousands of other messages Mrs. Clinton didn’t turn over that were, in fact, work-related, and once it finished the criminal probe into Mrs. Clinton it turned everything over to the State Department on eight disks.
The first of those disks contains 14,900 messages Mrs. Clinton sent or received that she did not turn over already.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.