The State Department has failed to meet a court-imposed deadline for the release of around 9,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s official e-mails by the end of December, and will instead publish just 5,500 pages later today.
“We have worked diligently to come as close to the goal as possible, but with the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule we have not met the goal this month,” read a State Department press release sent out Thursday morning.
In addition to falling short of their monthly document-production benchmark, the State Department revealed that the e-mails they do release will be less easily searchable than in past months. Critical information such as the subject line, sender, and recipient of each of the 5,500 emails apparently wasn’t entered into the State Department’s online database, which will make it more difficult for reporters to sift through Clinton’s correspondence and pinpoint interesting or important messages.
The State Department’s failure to keep to their legally mandated timetable for releasing Clinton’s e-mails has been an ongoing subplot in the scandal surrounding her use of a private, unsecured server at Foggy Bottom. The department also missed its benchmark in July, leading to accusations that the officials in charge of reviewing the e-mails were impeding their production in order to protect Clinton. Additional officials were assigned to review the messages after that deadline was missed.
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.
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