Thousands of Hillary Clinton's private emails will hit the Internet on New Year's Eve thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that permits the State Department to wait until the end of each month to release the documents.

The holiday email release will mark the eighth time the agency has published a batch of Clinton's records according to the monthly schedule. The first release came in May of this year and contained fewer than 300 emails, all of them related to Benghazi.

Clinton's use of a personal server to shield her private emails from the public hobbled the early days of her presidential campaign.

In the weeks since, her poll numbers have rebounded and speculation about whether the email controversy could cost her the nomination has largely abated.

The former secretary of state saw a turning point in the scandal near the end of October, when she took the stand for a grueling 11-hour hearing before the House Select Committee on Benghazi and fielded dozens of questions about her email use.

Clinton's poll numbers began to climb shortly after the hearing.

RCP Poll Average for Hillary Clinton, InsideGov





The final batch of Clinton emails will be released to the public Jan. 29.

At that point, all 55,000 pages of records will be available online for review.

Clinton has pointed to the State Department's steady publication of her emails as evidence of her commitment to transparency.

However, the documents she turned over to the agency late last year make up only half of the the total number of emails that were once stored on her personal server, which is now in FBI custody.

According to papers filed in the FOIA lawsuit that forced the State Department to begin publishing the emails earlier this year, the agency is scheduled to publish roughly 8,800 pages of records Thursday. The lawsuit was filed by Jason Leopold, a reporter at Vice News.

The New Year's Eve release should bring the total pages of Clinton emails available online to at least 45,100, with the remainder slated for publication in January. After a slow start, the agency has run ahead of schedule for the past few document releases.

Hundreds of emails are expected to be marked classified in the remaining unpublished email trove, as all monthly releases since this summer have contained classified material.