Washington: The US State Department has agreed to process for public release before the November 9 election almost 3,000 pages of Democratic nominee Hillary Clintons emails recovered by the FBI during their recent probe.
A federal judge previously ordered the State to review 1,050 pages of the Clinton messages before the election. The deal that State submitted to two other federal judges on Wednesday will add 1,850 pages to those already scheduled for processing, Politico reported.
The new agreement calls for the releasable portion of the additional 1,850 pages to be made public on State’s website on November 3. The existing schedule, in a case brought by conservative group Judicial Watch, calls for processing sets of 350 pages for posting on each of three days: October 7, October 21 and November 4.
While State has now agreed to process 2,900 pages of the Federal Bureau of Investigation-found emails by the election, far fewer than that may actually be made public by then.
State officials have said their initial appraisal deemed about 5,600 messages sent over by the FBI to be work-related, which could amount to more than 10,000 pages. However, about half those messages could be duplicates and some could still be determined to be personal and withheld in their entirety, Politico reported.
The set of 54,000 pages of messages Clinton turned over to State in late 2014 was made public in a process that wound up in February of this year.
The new messages were recovered by the FBI from various sources, including old computer equipment used by Clinton and her aides. Messages retained by others but not by Clinton are also believed to be part of the FBI collection.
–IANS