Hillary Clinton on her emails: I want them out, too! She says she has limited say over timetable while judge orders rolling release of emails.

Hillary Clinton and the State Department on Tuesday insisted they are not slow-walking the public release of her emails during her time as secretary of state, while a federal judge ordered up a plan for a rolling release of the hotly anticipated documents.

“Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do,” Clinton said to reporters in a rare instance of fielding press questions on the campaign trail.


The 55,000 pages of emails have become the source of much heartburn, speculation and bureaucratic man-hours since news emerged earlier this year that Clinton used a private email server during her time as secretary of state.

The controversy has complicated the roll-out of Clinton’s presidential bid and played into criticism that she and her husband are unduly secretive.

Clinton said in March that she wanted the State Department to release the emails, and since then, the agency has assigned 12 staffers full-time to reviewing the Clinton emails, according to an official.

The State Department on Monday night proposed a deadline of January 2016 to complete its review and publicly release the whole set of documents, but a federal judge on Tuesday rejected such a plan.

U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras on Tuesday said in a written order State must propose a new schedule by next Tuesday that involves disclosing the records batch-by-batch on a regular basis and updating the court every 60 days on the releases.

With the email controversy freshly swirling around her on the campaign trail, Clinton took a few questions from reporters on Tuesday — the first time she had done so since April 21, much to the jeers of her Republican opponents.

“Anything that they might do to expedite that process I heartily support,” she said to reporters after a roundtable in Cedar Falls, Iowa. “I want the American people to learn as much as they can about the work I did with our diplomats and our development experts.”

She contended she has limited say over the timetable.

“They’re not mine,” Clinton said about her emails. She turned over copies of them to her former department last December. “The State Department has to go through its process, but as much as they can expedite the process, that’s what I’m asking them to do.”

State spokesman Jeff Rathke said Tuesday that the agency will abide by the judge’s order.

“I don’t have anything to add to what was in the court papers,” Rathke told reporters at a daily briefing. “Clearly, the court has issued an order, and we’ll comply with it.”

Asked if State was “slow-rolling” release of the records in order to benefit Clinton politically, Rathke said, “No.”

Rathke reiterated State’s position that its initial proposal to release most of the records in a single batch was driven by a desire to ensure all the emails are handled appropriately.

“We have a large volume of records that cover the entire span of Secretary Clinton’s time at the department. I’m sure you could imagine this would cover pretty much any topic. It could cover any topic on our foreign policy agenda,” the spokesman said.

“If certain things were released early and there were other records pertinent to the same topic that that might not have been finally processed, there was a desire to do them all at once so they’d be processed in their entirety.”

The emails have also been a subject of intense interest from a House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, and documents unearthed as part of that probe have slowly leaked out.

Some of the emails revealed that Clinton forwarded unsubstantiated intelligence on Libya from Sidney Blumenthal, a family ally, to top officials at the State Department, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton family counselor and, according to the Times, an employee of the Clinton Foundation at the time, sent the intelligence reports based on information he had gathered while working as an adviser to Constellations Group, a private consultancy.

Clinton’s habit of forwarding the memos to top advisers like Jake Sullivan and Chris Stevens, the ambassador who was killed during the 2012 attacks, raised questions among committee members about the extent of Blumenthal’s influence at State — considering that aides cast doubt on the credibility of the memos in several emails.

At a brief hearing on Tuesday on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Vice News, Contreras did not set a specific date by which State must begin releasing the emails.

However, the judge gave the government one week to provide a schedule for the periodic release of records, Vice News lawyer Jeffrey Light said after the session.

Contreras also gave State one week to say exactly when it plans to release a portion of the records relating to the deadly attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, as well as other Libya-related issues. State officials have previously pledged to release those emails “soon” but have never offered a specific date.

The State Department has said the release is taking a while because it must thoroughly review the Clinton emails for sensitive information typically removed from records before they are released under FOIA. State official John Hackett said in the declaration filed Monday night that the agency wanted to post the bulk of the records online at once in order to make sure the FOIA rules and policies are consistently applied.

“The Department intends to post the releasable portions of the collection at the conclusion of its review process, which will facilitate consistency in the application of FOIA exemptions and the public’s access to and understanding of the documents,” Hackett wrote in the Monday document.

Clinton has said she turned over all messages that were arguably work-related but decided to delete a roughly equal number of messages that her lawyers determined were personal or private in nature.

The State Department could also face deadlines to disclose portions of the records in other FOIA suits. Last week, a judge ordered State to release records from Clinton’s top aides on specific topics by September. It’s unclear whether the requests in that case, brought by conservative group Citizens United, would encompass some of the Clinton emails.