Hillary Clinton E-Mail Scandal: State Department Releases 3,000 Pages of E-Mails

More than 3,000 pages of emails from the private server former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used while in office have been released by the State Department on June 30.

The correspondence, released online, covers March through December 2009.

Among the 1,900 emails released by the State Department, on July 11, 2009, Hillary Clinton received an email from “Jimmy” — presumably former President Jimmy Carter — titled “N. Korea.”

The message seems to be about freeing journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were charged and held with illegal passage into North Korea. It read:

The message read: “Hillary: As I explained to you on the phone, I don’t think it is appropriate to tell them that I will come only if they agree in advance to release the women. Your response was, in effect, <<They have already agreed.>> Is this correct? If not, I will go, by commercial airline if necessary, representing The Carter Center, and try to induce them to approve the release. JC”

Hillary Clinton forwarded the message onto a redacted email account with the comment “fyi.”

In May 2015, a District of Columbia judge ordered the State Department to release Hillary Clinton’s emails in batches ever 30 days, rejecting an agency plan to roll them out in early 2016.

The release will meet the court’s mandate that it match at least 7% of Hillary Clinton’s message traffic, department spokesman John Kirby said during a press briefing on June 30.

John Kirby tried to explain away the strange timing of the release.

“You have to understand the enormity of the task here. It is a lot of stuff to go through,” he told reporters, adding the agency was “working right up to the deadline” to get the emails out.

Questions over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server while serving as secretary of State have dogged her candidacy since she entered the White House race in April.

Also on June 30, the State Department handed over 3,600 pages of correspondence to the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the attacks on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.

The emails from Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the deadly 2012 assault, and former Hillary Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan were provided under a subpoena the GOP-controlled panel issued in March.

In a letter accompanying the document delivery, Hillary Clinton’s old agency said that “to the extent the materials produced relate to your inquiry, we do not believe they change the fundamental facts of the attacks on Benghazi”.