The State Department announced Tuesday that it has found 30 new emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server that discuss the terror attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.
With a steady stream of new Clinton emails being publicized in recent weeks, a federal judge has ordered the review and release of Clinton’s emails to be accelerated, the Washington Examiner reported.
A judge asked the agency to speed up its review of the documents in preparation for release to Judicial Watch, the conservative-leaning group that filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The emails were included among the roughly 15,000 emails FBI agents said they pulled from Clinton’s server.
Others were deleted beyond recovery after the Democratic nominee’s team used a digital tool called BleachBit.
The State Department has said it will need until the end of September to review all of the recently recovered 15,000 emails, which the FBI found during its investigation into Clinton’s server. State Department lawyers said Tuesday during a hearing before Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that they were determining how many of the 30 Benghazi-related emails were part of the batch of 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton handed over in 2014.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, which has asked the State Department to see if any of the Benghazi emails fall under its Freedom of Information Act request, said Tuesday that the department wants 30 days to review the documents before releasing them.
State finds 30 Benghazi-related "deleted" Clinton emails, wants 30 days to turn them over. Court demurs and suggests they move quicker.
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) August 30, 2016
In a separate development on Tuesday, law enforcement officials confirmed that the FBI is expected to publicly release its report on the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s server as early as Wednesday, including notes of a three-hour long interview with the former secretary of state.