The State Department said Tuesday that the FBI recovered roughly 30 emails concerning Benghazi during its closed investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. These were among the nearly 15,000 emails the FBI provided to the State Department earlier this month. On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported, government lawyers told U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta that an undisclosed number among the 30 were not included in the 55,000 pages' worth of emails that Clinton previously turned over to the State Department.
A State Department lawyer said that they would release the new emails to the public by the end of September, according to the Associated Press. The lawyer said the State Department needed to review the emails and redact potentially classified information before releasing them. But Mehta urged the State Department to speed up the process, asking why it would take so long to release such a small number of documents, and he has given the department a week to explain why the review process is expected to take a month.
The recovery of the emails concerning the 2012 Benghazi attacks was not the only development on Tuesday, either. An unnamed law enforcement official reportedly told the Associated Press that the FBI is expected to release documents pertaining to its year-long investigation in the near future.
Although FBI Director James Comey announced in July that he was not recommending that charges be brought against Clinton over her emails, he said that she had been "extremely careless" for using a private server. While the documents are expected to be released soon, an exact date has not been announced, and it is not clear what these documents will include. However, the anonymous official reportedly told the Associated Press that the FBI would make these documents public as it responds to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
The timing of these developments could prove to be difficult for Clinton, as the presidential election in November is rapidly approaching. Republican nominee Donald Trump has been targeting Clinton over her emails for months, accusing the Democratic nominee of telling "so many lies," and going so far as to call on Russia to find her allegedly deleted emails. His campaign has already responded to the FBI's recovery of the 30 or so emails about Benghazi, Politico reported, making a reference to the 30,000 emails that Clinton reportedly deleted because they were not work-related. In a statement, Trump’s senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, said that the FBI's new findings "raises additional questions" about the content of the deleted emails:
Hillary Clinton swore before a federal court and told the American people she handed over all of her work-related emails. If Clinton did not consider emails about something as important as Benghazi to be work-related, one has to wonder what is contained in the other emails she attempted to wipe from her server.
The information about these Benghazi emails came during a court hearing held in one of several lawsuits filed by the conservative group Judicial Watch, which has filed these lawsuits over access to government records from Clinton's time as secretary of state.
