WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department is reviewing nearly 15,000 previously undisclosed emails recovered as part of the FBI’s now-closed investigation into the handling of sensitive information that flowed through Hillary Clinton’s private home server.
Lawyers for the department told U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg on Monday that they anticipate processing and releasing the first batch of these new emails in mid-October, raising the prospect that new messages sent or received by the Democratic presidential nominee could become public just before November’s election.
Boasberg is overseeing production of the emails as part of a federal public-records lawsuit filed by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch.
Representing the State Department, Justice Department lawyer Lisa Olson told the judge that officials do not yet know what portion of the emails is work-related, rather than personal.
Clinton, who was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, had claimed that she deleted only personal emails prior to returning over 55,000 pages of her work-related messages to the State Department last year. The department has publicly released most of those work-related emails, although some have been withheld because they contain information considered sensitive to national security.
The thousands of previously undisclosed Clinton emails obtained by the FBI came from the accounts of other people she communicated with or were recovered through the bureau’s forensic examination of her old server.
Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon reiterated Monday that Clinton provided all the work-related emails she had “in her possession” when the State Department asked for copies in 2014.
“We are not sure what additional materials the Justice Department may have located, but if the State Department determines any of them to be work-related, then obviously we support those documents being released publicly as well,” Fallon said.
Republicans are pressing to keep the issue of Clinton’s email use alive after the FBI closed its investigation last month without recommending criminal charges. GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump routinely criticizes Clinton for her handling of emails containing classified information.
In a separate development, Judicial Watch also released 20 previously undisclosed email exchanges involving Clinton that were turned over by her former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin.
Among them is a June 23, 2009 message to Abedin from Doug Band, a longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton who then was an official at the Clinton family’s charitable foundation. Republicans charge that donors to the foundation, including foreign governments and corporations, got preferential treatment from the State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
Band sought to arrange for the crown prince of Bahrain to meet with Hillary Clinton while the prince was visiting Washington. “Good friend of ours,” Band wrote to Abedin, one of Clinton’s closest aides.
Crown Prince Salman had in 2005 made a $32 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a program run by the foundation.
In later emails Abedin confirmed that Clinton would meet with the prince. Copies of Clinton’s calendar obtained by AP confirm the meeting occurred in her State Department office on June 26, 2009.
In court on Monday, the State Department’s lawyer said the department earlier this month received seven discs containing “tens of thousands” of emails Clinton sent or received during her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat. The first disc, labeled by the FBI as containing non-classified emails not previously disclosed by Clinton, contains about 14,900 documents, Olson said. The second disc is labeled as emails containing classified information.
She said it was “extremely ambitious” for the agency to complete its review and begin releasing the first batches of emails to Judicial Watch by Oct. 14, given the volume of messages.
Judicial Watch lawyer Lauren Burke told Boasberg that the proposed schedule is too slow and pressed for faster release of the emails from the first disc. The judge ordered the department to focus on processing emails from the first disc and report back to him by Sept. 22.
The emails released Monday by Judicial Watch also offer more detail about Clinton’s meetings with Daniel Abraham — the SlimFast billionaire, founder of the Center for Middle East Peace and another Clinton Foundation donor.
Clinton met with Abraham on a day’s notice in May 2009, the emails show. The calendars show the meeting was one of eight between Abraham and Clinton during her tenure as secretary, the most of any Clinton Foundation donor.
Abraham last year told AP that his discussions with Clinton were about Middle East policy, and one of the newly released emails show that the following month Abedin wrote that Abraham wanted to talk with Clinton about Israel.
___
Associated Press reporter Stephen Braun contributed from Washington.
___
Follow Michael Biesecker on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mbieseck
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
What HRC said was that she instructed attorneys acting for the Clintons to remove only private emails. That’s not the same thing.
And we now understand from representations to Justtice Sullivan by counsel for HRC that the Clinton attorneys have reported that, contrary to HRC’s understanding they actually refrained from eading the “content” (or body of the messages within a given email or email stream), but simply delieted emails based on their header information, or that portion of the “meta data” of a given email or stream that displays the participants and the subject line, if the originator of the message or stream chose to use it.
So, what all that MEANS is that different from what was done by the Bush administration in its permanent destruction of some 11 million email messages, and by administration of Massachusetts Governor Romney, it its permanent destruction of its entire email base, all the Clinton attorneys did here was to use the ordinary standard “DELETE” function on the Clinton private server’s data base - which means:
A ) the deleted information was simply disengaged from the server’s message scaffolding,
B ) most if not all the deleted information could be retrieved form the part of the server’s database outside the message scaffolding,
C ) that part of the server’s database was preserved intact and is in fact proving viable for email retrieval,
D ) likely all these messages we’re learning now were retrieved were judged “private” by Clinton attorneys, based on the participants and subject headings or lack of any, and
E ) it’s likely that overwhelmingly these messages will turn out to be private in nature - EXACTLY the sorts of message HRC wanted conveyed outside the DoS and gov dot systems (i.e. ultimate irony).
In the end, it appears all the loose talk and internet nonsense about “55,000 missing emails” is just that: loose talk and nonsense. Instead, DoS has now retrieved about 40,000 email threads that it already had in someone other State employee’s database but didn’t realize it for FOIA purposes immediately (and since have, and how), and the FOIA process will also receive some AS YET UNKNOWN portion of the 15,000 emails deleted by Clinton attorneys as “private”.
And STILL, nothing about this entire process has been sufficient to overturn the soundness in Bernie Sanders’ decision to withhold even a damn from HRC’s emails.
I’m struggling to understand this lawsuit. So every non-classified email any government official sends is subject to public disclosure just for the asking?
I’m all for open government but struggling to see how this is an efficient us of taxpayer resources. I presume Kerry is next? And every other cabinet post? Scour hundreds of thousands of emails looking for things to embarrass people with?
Why would anyone who had any other option ever choose public service?
And by this standard, shouldn’t all phone calls be taped and those tapes released?
And now I understand Secretary Clinton has been compelled to submit to a written deposition for judicial watch?
What is the legal standing for this? I’m a a lawyer and I ask this. And for those who don’t know, the whole theory behind requiring someone to have standing to bring a lawsuit is to prevent abusive suits brought only to destroy public figures through endless abuse of process.
Trump thanks you for your support.
This Whitewater reboot is as boring as the original.
Another suburbanite who doesn’t pay his own way lecturing those who do because the girl he likes is really anti-TPP even though she doesn’t know what it stands for.