State Department officials may divert their attention away from other open records cases in order to prepare more of Hillary Clinton's emails for release before the election.

Most of the 5,600 work-related emails recovered by the FBI — half of which may be duplicates of emails already made public — would stay secret beyond Election Day under the current arrangement. The State Department said last week that it could only process around 1,000 records for release by November.

But a judge asked the agency on Monday to focus more of its resources on the undisclosed Clinton emails and less on other Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Jason Leopold, the Vice News reporter whose lawsuits forced the publication of Clinton's original 30,000 emails.

Leopold had requested a wide variety of Clinton records from the State Department, and included the FBI documents in his case after the investigation yielded additional emails.

More than a half-dozen FOIA lawsuits are seeking Clinton-related records in the seven weeks before voters head to the polls. However, the State Department has repeatedly argued that its FOIA resources are already stretched too thin when asked to speed up the review process in order to accommodate the political pressures of the election.

The potential deal between Leopold and the State Department was first reported by Politico.

If successful, it would expose the thousands of work-related records Clinton deleted in late 2014, despite her frequent and forceful assertions that everything related to her government duties was included in the batch of 30,000 emails her team provided the State Department.

Leopold had asked the State Department for all the work-related emails authored by Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines, three of Clinton's closest aides during her diplomatic tenure. He had requested those emails whether they originated in a State Department inbox or a personal one.

The Vice News reporter had also asked for emails authored by four additional State Department staffers who worked closely with Clinton, as well as records related to hot-button issues like waterboarding and the Keystone Pipeline.

But the search for those records could be put on hold if the push for a deal is successful. That agreement could permit as many as 2,200 emails to be made public by the end of October.