The State Department still has to go through 40,000 of Hillary Clinton’s documents from her time as secretary of state the agency said at a federal court hearing, over an ongoing Freedom of Information Act case.
The right-leaning watchdog group Judicial Watch, which is a party in the case, pointed out the slow speed to reporters, noting that the State Department has processed 32,000 of Clinton’s emails and documents thus far – some of which are from Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer.
Only a portion of Clinton’s emails have been made public.
‘Secretary Tillerson should be asked why his State Department is still sitting on a motherlode of Clinton emails,’ Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. ‘It is disheartening that an administration elected to “drain the swamp” is stalling the release of documents to protect Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration.’
A State Department spokesman has yet to return DailyMail.com’s request for comment.
Some 40,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails and documents from her time at the State Department have yet to be processed by the agency, a right-leaning watchdog told reporters Monday
Some of the documents in question were found by the FBI on a laptop belonging to disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner (left) who’s the estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin (right)
Last November, the State Department was ordered to produce no fewer than 500 pages of Clinton documents a month to Judicial Watch.
The watchdog group has complained that that’s simply too slow, suggesting that at that speed, the full cache of Clinton emails won’t be publicly available until 2020, the year of the next presidential election.
At the latest hearing before Judge James E. Boasberg, the State Department said it was increasing resources to its FOIA operation, though wouldn’t commit to speeding up the process.
The judge then ordered that at the next hearing, scheduled for November 30, 2017, the ‘defendant shall explain how its anticipated increase in resources will affect processing of records in this case and when the processing of each disk is likely to be completed.’
As part of a related lawsuit, the State Department said it had recovered 2,800 work-related documents of Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin, which were on her estranged husband Weiner’s computer, Judicial Watch pointed out last Tuesday in a release to reporters.
The emails were on a computer given to the FBI by Weiner as the agency probed allegations that he had been sexting with an underage girl, a story first broken by DailyMail.com.
Last month, Weiner was sentenced to 21 months in prison over the sexting case.
Fitton said he still believes Clinton and Abedin committed a crime as both the secretary of state and Abedin, who served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, used private email addresses connected to a homebrew server to conduct government business.
‘This is a disturbing development,’ Fitton said in a press release last week, which touted the number of emails found. ‘Our experience with Abedin’s emails suggest these Weiner laptop documents will include classified and other sensitive materials.’
‘When will the Justice Department do a serious investigation of Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s obvious violations of law?’ Fitton asked.
The FBI did investigate Clinton’s emails but closed the probe up last year.
In July 2016, then FBI Director James Comey hosted a press conference announcing that the FBI would recommend to the Department of Justice that Democratic nominee Clinton not be charged for mishandling classified information.
While Comey called Clinton ‘extremely careless’ in her handling of sensitive information he also said that no ‘reasonable prosecutor’ would bring a criminal case against her.
Then, in October, Comey wrote a letter to lawmakers informing them of new emails found on the Weiner computer – a revelation that threw Clinton’s campaign into a tailspin – that ended up with her being beat by now President Donald Trump.
Just days after Comey’s letter was made public the FBI announced that nothing new had been found and that the case against Clinton had been closed again.
But Judicial Watch hasn’t given up.
Two months after it became public knowledge that Clinton had used a private server while working as secretary of state, Judicial Watched sued the State Department in May 2015 for not handing over her emails as part of a March 2015 Freedom of Information Act request.
The group had asked for ‘All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-‘state.gov’ email address.
In a joint status report signed off by Judicial Watch and the State Department, and dated earlier this month, the State Department names the number of documents found on Weiner’s computer – 2,800 – and says it plans to have it review of those documents completed by December 31, 2017.
‘Based on a preliminary review, the State Department expects that a significant portion of these documents may be duplicative of material already reviewed and processed,’ the court document reads.
In the more general emails FOIA case, Judicial Watch has requested that the State Department inform the group ‘in a timely manner’ if the agency plans to withhold any of Clinton’s records from the seven discs of content it has from the FBI case and give a reason for why it plans to do so.