WASHINGTON — The State Department said it would release about 3,000 pages of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s correspondence from 2009, her first year as the nation’s top diplomat, on Tuesday night.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said the emails, covering March through December 2009, would be posted online.
“There’s been nothing but nearly nonstop work on this” since the last group of emails was released, Kirby told reporters at a State Department briefing in which he acknowledged the inconvenient timing. “You have to understand the enormity of the task here. It is a lot of stuff to go through.”
The release comes as part of a court mandate that the agency release batches of Clinton’s email correspondence from her time as secretary of state every 30 days starting June 30. The goal is for the department to publicly unveil 55,000 pages of her emails by Jan. 29, 2016. They were sent from the personal email address Clinton used when she was secretary.
Clinton has said she wants the department to release the emails as soon as possible. The disclosure that she conducted State Department business on a private email account has been a controversy for her campaign.
The State Department’s planned release of the emails came amid word that the GOP-led House committee investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, will hold a public business meeting next week to vote on whether to release the transcript of longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal’s deposition.
Blumenthal testified behind closed doors for more than eight hours earlier this month, and Democrats have been pressing the panel to release the full transcript.
The committee, led by Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, had released Blumenthal’s emails with Clinton.
