Hillary Clinton is passionately devoted to transparency, which is why she earnestly declared in March of last year: "I want the public to see my emails." How badly does Hillary want the voting public to have a full accounting of the emails she failed to preemptively delete from her unsecured private server? This badly:
The State Department is asking a federal judge for a one-month extension to finish releasing the final batch of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, a State official confirmed Friday.
The Department asked for more time to comply with a court order mandating the monthly release of Clinton’s 30,000 work emails that followed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Under the court's timeline for release, State was supposed to make public the final batch of documents — which will be the largest in terms of page volume — on Jan. 31. Instead they’re seeking an extension through Feb. 29.
By then, four states will have already cast their votes in the Democratic primary; 12 additional states would be preparing to cast ballots on March 1, or Super Tuesday. What are the odds? The request for an extension was filed on a Friday afternoon as Washington, D.C., was shutting down in preparation for Winter Storm Jonas. The storm itself, obviously, was also complicating efforts to retrieve Clinton's emails.
Lawyers representing Vice News reporter Jason Leopold are fighting the delay:
"Unless and until State explains how over 7,000 pages that were already reviewed and identified as needing review by at least one other agency were lost for up to six months, and then suddenly found again just weeks before the deadline to produce them, the Court should view skeptically State’s assertion that this constitutes a legitimate 'unexpected' event," lawyers Ryan James and Jeffrey Light wrote in a court filing Monday morning on behalf of Vice News reporter Jason Leopold.
"Allowing State to delay the release of thousands of pages of a presidential candidate's work emails, especially when they have already garnered so much media and public attention, until after four states have voted and until just hours before another 11 states and American Samoa will vote, would deny Mr. Leopold of the opportunity to realize the fruits of his year-long pursuit of these records which he and the public have a legal right under [the Freedom of Information Act] to obtain," James and Light wrote.
Contreras issued an order in May requiring monthly release of batches of the 54,000 pages of emails Clinton kept on a private server and turned over to her former agency in December 2014. The judge set monthly goals for the percentage of pages released, but he ordered that the process be completed by Friday, Jan. 29.
State missed the monthly goals on two occasions, but subsequently made up the shortfalls. Now, it wants the final deadline extended to Feb. 29.
Meanwhile, the Hillary Clinton email scandal is starting to look pretty bad—as in, someone should definitely go to prison, provided they are not "too big to jail." Clinton, for her part, has blamed the the controversy surrounding her bizarre (and potentially illegal) email practices on "Republicans and their allies."