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Judge sets N.H. primary-day hearing on Hillary Clinton email suit

The legal haggling over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email account as secretary of state seems destined to closely shadow her presidential campaign at least through next week's New Hampshire primary after a federal judge scheduled a hearing next Tuesday on a key lawsuit seeking those messages.

U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered government lawyers to appear in federal court in Washington at 2:30 p.m. Feb. 9, the same day as the first-in-the-nation primary. His order issued Monday afternoon doesn't give specifics, but the hearing appears intended to discuss the status of their efforts to comply with an order he entered last year requiring monthly releases of the 54,000 pages of emails Clinton turned over to her former agency in 2014 at its request.

Contreras ordered the State Department to complete that process by Jan. 29 — last Friday — but the agency failed to meet that deadline. State said it overlooked more than 7,000 pages of messages in need of interagency review and now needs until the end of February to get those messages properly reviewed for release.

Lawyers for the Freedom of Information Act requester who brought the suit, Jason Leopold of Vice News, have told the judge that State hasn't adequately explained the foul-up and has failed to establish why the monthlong delay is needed.