The US State Department stated that roughly 30 emails of the 14,900 recovered during the FBI’s investigation of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s private email server, may be related to the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya.
Government lawyers informed U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta on Tuesday, that an undermined amount of the emails among the 30 were not included in the 55,000 pages previously provided by Clinton. The State Department’s lawyer said it would take till the end of September to review the emails and redact potentially classified information before they are released for public perusal.
Mehta questioned why it would take so long to release such a small number of documents, and urged that the process be sped up. He ordered the department to report to him in a week with more details regarding why the review process would take a full month.
Clinton has previously stated that she withheld and deleted only personal emails that were unrelated to her duties as US Secretary of State.
The agency has committed to releasing the newly uncovered documents under a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
Also on Tuesday, in a separate development, Clinton was asked by the Judicial Watch about her decision in 2009 to rely on a private server in the basement of her New York home, rather than a government email account.
Clinton was also ordered earlier this month, by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, to answer the group’s questions under oath. Sullivan’s wording did not make it explicitly clear whether Clinton must answer the questions before or after the November election. Judicial Watch contends that the deadline is September 29.
Though he described Clinton’s actions as “extremely careless,” FBI Director James Comey said his agents found no evidence that anyone intended to break the law and said “no reasonable prosecutor” would have brought a criminal case.
