State Department Delays Full Hillary Clinton Email Dump Until After Early Primaries

The State Department will release 2,000 pages of Hillary Clinton emails Friday, but that’s a fraction of the remaining Clinton emails still in its possession.

The Department has 7,000 more pages of Clinton’s emails that it chooses not to release yet. The State Department’s Friday dump represents less than 23 percent of the remaining emails. Vice reporter Jason Leopold is suing the State Department in District Court in Washington, D.C. for the full release.

So when will the emails all be released? Not until February 29, by which point Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina will already have pledged its delegates to either Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Martin O’Malley.

The Department said in a court filing:

It has approximately 9,000 more pages to go. During this enormously complex undertaking,State missed sending to some of the necessary agencies approximately 7,000 pages that it hadidentified as requiring interagency consultation. This error did not come to light until threeweeks before the January 29 deadline set by the Court for the final production of Clinton emails.Since discovering its oversight, State has moved diligently to process the documents and sendthem to the appropriate agencies for review, a process that was interrupted by the blizzard that struck Washington, D.C. over the weekend.

The Department petitioned the Court to rule that “State’s request for a modest 30-day extension to complete processing approximately 9,000 pages of emails, some 7,000 of which are still undergoing interagency review, is reasonable under the circumstances.”

The State Department has been sympathetic to Clinton during this scandal to the point of complicity. In fact, a top State Department official even told Clinton’s lawyer to destroy evidence.

Patrick Kennedy, the department’s Under Secretary of State for Management, actually wrote a letter to Clinton’s attorney in May 2015, two months after Clinton’s private email scandal broke, asking Clinton to “please delete” an email with the subject line “Fw: FYI – Report of arrests – possible Benghazi connection).”