A judge on Monday ordered the US Department of State to review for possible release 14,900 e-mails and attachments that the FBI found when investigating US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
The judge also scheduled a Sept. 23 hearing on when to release the e-mails, a deadline that raises the possibility that some will become public before the Nov. 8 presidential election.
Questions about her e-mail practices as secretary of state have dogged Clinton’s White House run and triggered an FBI probe that found she was “extremely careless” with sensitive information by using a private server, but recommended against bringing charges.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters it was still reviewing the 14,900 documents and it was unclear how many were personal or work-related.
He also said that it was unclear how many might duplicate those already released, but that there were “likely to be quite a few” not previously disclosed.
The department has already gone through 30,068 of Clinton e-mails from her 2009 to 2013 tenure as secretary of state and released most of them, amounting to about 55,000 pages. More than 2,000 e-mails were found to contain classified information.
The disclosure of further e-mails could provide more fodder for opponents, who have seized on the issue to argue that Clinton is untrustworthy.
Clinton has said she did not compromise classified information and used a private server for convenience. She later apologized.
The order by US District Court Judge James Boasberg, who is overseeing a group of lawsuits seeking to make Clinton’s e-mails public, came the day Judicial Watch made public a batch of Clinton’s e-mails obtained through a lawsuit.
Judicial Watch said the e-mails showed donors to the Clinton family’s charitable foundation seeking access to her during the period when she was secretary of state.
Toner said the State Department believed there was “no impropriety” in foundation officials seeking to meet Clinton, saying any secretary of state or aides get such requests from a wide range of people.
The 14,900 documents referred to by Boasberg are believed to include e-mails not included among those Clinton previously turned over to the State Department after her use of a private e-mail server and private e-mail account became public.
“This number reflects both non-record [meaning personal] and record materials [meaning work-related],” said a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Some of the e-mails were found on the servers of people with whom Clinton or her staff were communicating.
Former US secretary of state Colin Powell over the weekend dismissed reports that Clinton told federal investigators that it was at his suggestion that she used a personal e-mail account, according to a media report.
Powell, who served as secretary from 2001 to 2005 under former US president George W. Bush, told People magazine that while he did send Clinton a memo about his own e-mail practices, Clinton had already begun to use personal e-mail rather than a government account while she had the job.
“Her people have been trying to pin it on me... The truth is: She was using [the private e-mail server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did,” Powell told People on Saturday.
The New York Times last week reported that Clinton told investigators that Powell had suggested when the two spoke over dinner that she use personal e-mail for unclassified messages.
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