State Department officials missed yet another deadline for publishing 2,900 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails Thursday evening after failing to meet a court-ordered benchmark on New Year’s Eve.
The agency had initially aimed to publish the emails online by 10 p.m. before pushing the deadline back later in the evening, then declining to release the emails at all Thursday evening.
In court filings late Thursday, State Department officials said they planned to publish the emails “in the early morning hours” of Friday. A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Jason Leopold, a reporter at Vice News, forced the release of emails at the end of every month since May.
The State Department is now in violation of a federal judge’s order in that court case. Agency officials said they planned to release the emails around 2 a.m. Friday.
The new batch of records will contain 45 classified messages, including one that was upgraded to “secret,” a higher level of classification. Last week, the agency published a batch of emails that contained 275 classified records.
Agency officials pointed to the holiday schedule for their failure to reach a court-ordered benchmark for the publication of Clinton’s emails at the end of December. The late-night release of Clinton emails that was scheduled for Thursday was an attempt by the State Department to make up for that shortfall.
