Government lawyers have said the FBI has also recovered emails from Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were stored on the Clintonemail.com system. | Getty FBI begins sending State Department recovered Clinton emails

Thousands of emails the FBI recovered from Hillary Clinton's servers began flowing Thursday from the law enforcement agency to the State Department, where they'll be processed for public release, according to a new court filing.

"Yesterday, the FBI began transferring the retrieved materials to the State Department, and will continue to transfer the retrieved materials to the State Department on a rolling basis," Justice Department lawyers wrote in a report filed in federal court in Washington Friday in connection with one of dozens of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits involving the Clinton emails.


In addition to the approximately 2,000 to 3,000 Clinton emails that the FBI found that were not among the roughly 30,000 she turned over to the State Department in late 2014, government lawyers have said the FBI has also recovered emails from Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were stored on the Clintonemail.com system.

In the filing Friday, the attorneys representing the FBI said they could not estimate at the moment how long the transfer process would take, although they said "thousands of documents" are involved. Government lawyers have said the transfer is being done electronically.

While the additional emails are being processed for release under FOIA, some of them may never be available to the public. If State and the National Archives determine that the messages are entirely personal in nature, they could be deemed not to be "agency records" and excluded from the materials provided in response to FOIA requests.