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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gives an address on national security, Thursday, June 2, in San Diego, Calif. | AP Photo State Department seeks 2-year-plus delay in suit for Clinton aides’ emails

Citing the agency's own errors in the handling of a request for emails of four former aides to Hillary Clinton, the State Department is asking a federal judge to extend the deadline to complete processing of the records by more than two years.

Justice Department lawyers notified U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras on Wednesday that State will be unable to meet the court-ordered deadline of July 21 in the lawsuit the conservative group Citizens United brought earlier this year seeking emails ex-State Department officials Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Melanne Verveer and Michael Fuchs exchanged with individuals at the Clinton Foundation or a firm with ties to the Clintons, Teneo Consulting.

The government lawyers asked Contreras to give State an additional 27 months— until October 2018—to finish work on the request, processing documents at a rate of about 500 pages a month.

State FOIA official Eric Stein said the agency thought in March that searches turned up about 6,000 documents potentially responsive to the request and that fewer than half of those were likely to be ultimately responsive after duplicates were culled out.

However, in recent months, "the Department discovered errors in the manner in which the searches had been conducted in order to capture documents potentially responsive to Plaintiff’s requests," Stein told the judge in a written declaration. One office he did not further identify searched only the 'from' and 'to' fields of messages, meaning that forwarded messages involving the individuals identified by Citizens United might not have been captured.

In addition, Stein said State realized that "due to some errors recently identified with the responsiveness review, some attachments to responsive e-mails were inadvertently marked as non-responsive."

As a result, it now appears more than 14,000 pages are covered by Citizens United's request and that number could grow as State wrestles with the attachment issue, Stein said.

The litigation spiraling from the discovery over a year ago of Clinton's use of a private email s during her four years of secretary of state seems to be intensifying, as conservative groups, the Republican National Committee and some in the media press to receive their requested records in advance of the election.

Citizens United President David Bossie called the delay State requested this week "outrageous" and explicitly accused the agency of trying to cover for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

"This is totally unacceptable; the State Department is using taxpayer dollars to protect their candidate Hillary Clinton." Bossie said. "The American people have a right to see these emails before the election. If transparency is truly important to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, they will order the production of all of these records as ordered by the court by July 21, 2016. The conflicts of interest that were made possible by the activities of Hillary Clinton’s State Department in tandem with the Clinton Foundation are of significant importance to the public and the law enforcement community."

Asked about Bossie's claim that State is trying to aide Clinton by slow-walking the records, a State spokeswoman had no direct comment.

However, State spokesman John Kirby blamed resource constraints and—as POLITICO revealed Wednesday—a growing backlog of requests now numbering over 29,000.

"We cannot comment as this matter is in ongoing litigation," Kirby said. "Generally speaking, there has been a significant surge in FOIA requests to the State Department in recent years and we are working diligently to respond. The volume of FOIA requests received by the Department has tripled since 2008."

"In fiscal year 2015 alone we received approximately 22,000 FOIA requests. The requests are also frequently more complex and seek larger volumes of documents, requiring significantly more time, resources, and interagency coordination. While we have increased staffing for our FOIA office, our available resources are still nonetheless constrained," Kirby said.

State says it has processed all work-related records in about 54,000 pages of emails Clinton turned over to her former agency in 2014. However, hundreds of requests for official-account and private-account emails from a slew of Clinton aides are pending.

State said this week it is falling behind in routine processing of requests as officials focus on the 106 FOIA lawsuits pending against the agency, most of them involving emails or other records related to Clinton or her top aides.