The Department of State is asking to delay January’s scheduled release of the next batch of emails sent from a private email server by Hillary Clinton and her staff while she was Obama’s Secretary of State, but the claimed reason for the delay has Republicans crying foul while leaving others scoffing.
Obama’s State Department now claims the first big snow storm of 2016 is at fault for preventing the release of the emails, despite that the storm didn’t start until late on Friday afternoon and was to be done long before the start of business on Monday.
Because of the storm, State is asking a federal court for a one-month extension to release the January batch of emails.
“The Clinton email team must perform its work on site. … This storm will disrupt the Clinton email team’s current plans to work a significant number of hours throughout the upcoming weekend and could affect the number of documents that can be produced on January 29, 2016,” State Department lawyers said in their request.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus slammed the extension request saying, “It’s clear that the State Department’s delay is all about ensuring any further damaging developments in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal are revealed only after the votes are counted in the early nominating states.”
“The American people should be outraged at the Obama administration’s gamesmanship to protect someone who recklessly exposed classified information on more than 1,300 occasions, including highly sensitive Top Secret intelligence,” Priebus added.
A State Department spokesman insisted that over 9,000 of the remaining 55,000 Hillary emails will take the most review to screen for sensitive information before being released, and there isn’t enough time to fulfill the court’s demands without the time extension.
Despite Hillary’s claims she never sent any classified information over her private email server, last week it was revealed that some of the emails Hillary and her staff sent were so secret that even many members of Congress would not have the security clearance to read them, much less send them from private email servers.
Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III told Fox News, “several dozen” emails included information about “special access programs.” SAPs are classified as beyond top secret, and sending emails about these programs over unsecure email services is a clear violation of the law.
On Thursday, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said there is plenty of evidence to charge Hillary for breaking the law and mishandling classified information.
Mukasey noted that such charges have already derailed the career of a high profile government official.
“This is the same charge,” Mukasey said, “brought against Gen. David Petraeus for disclosing classified information in his personal notebooks to his biographer and mistress, who was herself an Army Reserve military intelligence officer cleared to see top secret information.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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