The State Department on Friday requested a one-month extension for releasing its final batch of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server, blaming the massive blizzard that dumped more than 22 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. this weekend and shut down all federal offices on Monday, reports The Hill.
The department asked a federal court in Washington to extend the Jan. 29 deadline for it to release the last batch of some 30,000 Clinton work emails from her time as secretary of state from 2009-2013. In May, the court ordered the emails to be released monthly in accordance with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
"[T]he Department asked the court for a one month extension, to February 29th, to finish our production of former Secretary Clinton's emails," State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said in a statement, claiming that 9,400 of the 55,000 remaining pages "contain a large amount of material that required interagency review," reports Politico. "State Department staff have been working extremely hard to process these emails and we are committed to getting them out. The court's goal for this month's production represented the largest number of pages to date."
Agency lawyers said that the "Clinton email team must perform its work on site" and that the "storm will disrupt the Clinton email team's current plans to work a significant number of hours throughout the upcoming weekend and could affect the number of documents that can be produced on January 29, 2016," according to Fox News.
If the extension is granted, the last batch of emails, which is expected to contain emails with high classification levels that could further damage Clinton's reputation, wouldn't be released until after primary contests in four key states, including Iowa and New Hampshire.
Republicans were quick to accuse the department of attempting to influence Clinton's standing in early voting states.
"It's clear that the State Department's delay is all about ensuring any further damaging developments in Hillary Clinton's email scandal are revealed only after the votes are counted in the early nominating states," Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said, according to Fox News. "The American people should be outraged at the Obama administration's gamesmanship to protect someone who recklessly exposed classified information on more than 1,300 occasions, including highly sensitive Top Secret intelligence."
Clinton has come under fire for forgoing the use of an official government email during her tenure as the nation's top diplomat, and instead choosing to exclusively use an unsecured private email server based out of her New York home. Security experts believe that foreign governments and hackers likely accessed the server, which contained more than 1,300 emails that have now been classified at levels even higher than "top secret." Clinton has insisted that she never sent or received any information that was marked as classified at the time.
