State department lawyers have announced Monday that they plan to make 15,000 previously unreleased emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server public during the weeks leading up to Election Day, according to The New York Times. This is not favorable for Clinton, who did not voluntarily turn over the emails, as the email scandal will continue to follow her right up until Nov. 8 and beyond.
The FBI recovered these 14,900 emails during its investigation into Clinton’s email use as Secretary of State. The emails are now being reviewed for classified information and sorted into personal and work-related categories, which is why they can’t be released right away.
The new documents are an addition to the 30,000 work-related emails that Clinton’s lawyers turned over to the department in December 2014. FBI director James Comey said in July that he does not believe the emails were “intentionally deleted” from the original documents given to them, but it’s still not a great look for Clinton. The FBI cleared Clinton of criminal conduct, even though they said she was “extremely careless” in her use of the private email server.
In response to the findings of these new documents, the Clinton campaign said they “are not sure what additional materials the Justice Department may have located, but if the state department determines any of them to be work-related, then obviously we support those documents being released publically as well,” according to the Times.
Now, state lawyers say the plan is to release the emails in four separate batches over the course of about a month leading up to election day, with the dates in mind being Oct. 14, 21 and 28, and Nov. 4. Yes, that’s four days before election day. Judge James Boasberg felt that the department should try to meet an earlier deadline with their releases, the Guardian reports, and a hearing will be scheduled in September to review progress on going through the documents—but one lawyer has said that the October and November dates are already going to be tough deadlines to meet.
No matter what’s actually in these thousands of emails, the fact that they’ve been found at all will be enough to keep people from trusting Clinton. It’s a challenge the former Secretary will have to keep fighting right up until the election—hopefully by being as transparent and honest with voters as possible.