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Clinton Emails: Judge Orders Phased Rollout Starting June 30

In this Dec. 8, 2011, file photo, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hands off her mobile phone after arriving to meet with Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, Netherlands.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

May 27, 2015, 7:12 PM

 -- The federal judge presiding over the case involving Hillary Clinton’s 55,000 pages of emails from her tenure as secretary of state has ordered the State Department to begin releasing them in a rolling fashion beginning on June 30 and to post all of the documents eligible for release on the department’s website by Jan. 29.

Judge Rudolph Contreras of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., amended a court filing from the State Department that proposed posting the emails in batches every 60 days, cutting that time period to every 30 days. In his order, the judge said the State Department should “aspire” to release 7 percent of the documents on June 30, with an increasing percentage of documents released each time.

The matter was brought to court after a news organization sued the State Department, demanding the emails be released pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. Clinton has said she wants the State Department to make all her emails public.

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State Department officials have argued that the process of clearing the emails for release is an arduous and time-consuming task that often involves the participation of multiple government agencies.

“Keep in mind that we are reviewing a huge amount of material from Secretary Clinton’s tenure at State on a wide range of issues,” one senior State Department official said Tuesday.

Last Friday, the State Department released 300 of Clinton’s emails that related to the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya. Those emails previously had been released to the House Select Committee on Benghazi that’s been investigating the attack for more than a year.

The chairman of the that committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., has said he won’t be satisfied until Clinton hands over her private email server, which she used exclusively throughout her tenure at State to conduct official business. Clinton has said she won’t make that available. Gowdy and other Republicans argue that because Clinton's emails were kept private, she was the ultimate arbiter in determining which emails to release and which to delete -- and therefore, the process is flawed.