The FBI by Aug. 5 will transfer to the State Department the final batch of thousands of work-related emails it found in a year-long investigation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s personal email setup, government lawyers said in a court filing Friday.
The filing did not state when the State Department will make those emails public. The transfer deadline was disclosed in a civil lawsuit for public records.
The FBI turned over a first disc containing “thousands of documents” and another with classified documents on July 21, and expects to complete “a second and final transmission” no later than next Friday, according to a three-page government status report.
Once that occurs, the State Department will begin searching for emails requested by the conservative group Judicial Watch related to the employment arrangement of Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton confidant and deputy chief of staff during Clinton’s tenure as secretary from 2009 to 2013. Judicial Watch is probing whether Clinton’s use of a private server thwarted the Freedom of Information Act.
The State Department expects to finish by Wednesday its search of the first email batch transferred by the FBI, Justice Department senior trial attorney Caroline Lewis Wolverton wrote in court filings to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia.
The first batch consists of emails and attachments sent directly to or from Clinton, and to or from her includeding an email chain, the court filing states.
The department expects to search the second set by Aug. 12. That batch mainly includes materials recovered by the FBI from email accounts other than Clinton’s, including those of Abedin, Wolverton said.
The government filing did not indicate how long it would take to turn over the results of the searches for the Judicial Watch case. It also did not provide a timeline for when it would review and release the full volume of FBI materials to the public.
On July 7, the Justice Department closed its investigation of the Clinton system’s handling of classified information on the personal server without charges after FBI Director James Comey said investigators concluded the handling was “extremely careless,” but not criminal.
A State Department spokesman the following week said that it would make public materials recovered by the FBI. Those materials, Comey said, included emails that were not among 30,000 emails Clinton’s lawyers returned to the State Department in 2014.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Spencer S. Hsu
{Matzav.com}
They will had them over just as soon as they scrub them clean. It’s a whitwash, folks – and most of the voting public will believe the whole thing.