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The State Department will post a batch of about 550 of Hillary Clinton's messages. | Getty State Department offers Clinton email installment Saturday

Responding to a federal judge's complaints about delays in the court-ordered process of releasing Hillary Clinton's emails, the State Department is now offering to post a batch of about 550 messages online Saturday.

In a court filing late Wednesday, State Department records official Eric Stein said State had identified "additional resources" that could allow the sub-set of Clinton's messages to pass through a multi-stage process for release on the agency's website by Saturday.

At a hearing Tuesday in front of U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras, a Justice Department attorney representing State said the earliest State could do such an interim release of the Clinton emails was February 18.

However, Stein said that date could now be moved up by five days.

"Since the Department of Justice was last briefed before the hearing, the State Department team working on the Clinton email project has made significant progress on the documents that are available for an interim production," Stein said. "Based on...changed circumstances, State now anticipates making the interim production of the documents discussed during the hearing on Saturday, February 13, 2016, via a posting on its [Freedom of Information Act] website. That production is expected to consist of approximately 550 documents (approximately 14% of the remaining pages to be posted), which are the documents that have already proceeded through final, internal State Department review."

State said last month it would be unable to meet the court-imposed deadline of Jan. 29 to complete processing and release of all of the emails Clinton turned over to State in December 2014. The diplomatic agency said it belatedly discovered that more than 7,000 pages that required interagency review had never been circulated to all the necessary agencies. State asked the judge to extend the deadline for all the records to the end of this month, but Contreras said Tuesday he wanted the agency to make a partial release before then, in part due to public interest in the records in connection with Clinton's ongoing campaign for the White House.

During the hearing Tuesday on a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold, Contreras ordered that a detailed report on the failure to meet the Jan. 29 deadline be submitted to the court by Friday.

Contreras also asked whether State could move any more rapidly to release the approved-for-release emails to Leopold, either in hardcopy, a PDF file or in-person review at a computer terminal. The judge noted that he never ordered online release of the emails.

In the new filing, State said it could print out hardcopies of the documents on Friday night and send them to Leopold by overnight mail or allow his attorneys to pick up a paper copy. However, Stein said the agency would prefer simply to conduct the release through the usual means on the web.

"Such a hard copy production and delivery would divert resources that are required for the final production, while not providing the public access that would be available the next day under State’s plan for an interim posting on its website," wrote Stein, a senior adviser and deputy to the deputy assistant secretary of State for global information services.

Josh Gerstein is a senior reporter for POLITICO.