Blaming an unforeseen “oversight” and the blizzard starting to sweep through the nation’s capital, the State Department has asked a federal court to push back its deadline for the final release of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails a full month, to February 29.

Government attorney Robert Prince appeared in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C. Friday morning to argue that the State Department needed more time to process thousands of pages of e-mails from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. After VICE news filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit last year, the Department was ordered to release the e-mails in monthly batches with a set completion date of January 31.

The State Department has repeatedly failed to stick to that court-ordered schedule, missing a deadline in July, nearly missing another in August, overshooting its New Year’s Eve due date by more than a week, and then postponing an already-delayed January 7 deadline into the wee hours of January 8. Now the cabinet agency is saying it will fall short of yet another statutory deadline for release of the e-mails.

Explaining the latest delay, Prince said that approximately 7,200 e-mails deemed to require “interagency consultation” before their release last summer were in fact never sent to the relevant agencies. “This oversight was not detected until the push to meet the final deadline,” he told the court. Prince added that though they were now working to correct the problem, “the delivery of the remaining documents has been interrupted by the storm” and will not be completed until next week.

#related#The upshot is that thousands of Clinton’s e-mails will remain off-limits to the public until after the Iowa caucus on February 1 and the New Hampshire primary on February 9, both tightly contested races in which Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is gaining ground on the former secretary of state.

— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.