A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the US State Department to produce a plan to release batches of Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time there, raising the prospect of months of drip-by-drip disclosures that could plague her presidential campaign.
US District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered the State Department to come up with a timetable by next week for the rolling release of the 55,000 pages of emails, according to a lawyer in the case, Jeffrey Light, France24 reported.
It was a rebuke to the State Department which said on Monday it might need until January, 2016 to produce the emails.
Republicans want the emails to be made public soon to cast more light on Clinton’s term as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, a time when the US struggled to reset relations with Russia and develop a strategy for Syria’s civil war.
The judge also urged the State Department to present a schedule in the coming days for releasing 300 Clinton emails related to US operations in Benghazi, Libya where four Americans, including the US ambassador, were killed in a 2012 attack.
