State Department weighs deal to speed up release of deleted Clinton emails

State Department officials may divert their attention away from other open records cases in order to prepare more of Hillary Clinton's emails for release before the election.

Most of the 5,600 work-related emails recovered by the FBI — half of which may be duplicates of emails already made public — would stay secret beyond Election Day under the current arrangement. The State Department said last week that it could only process around 1,000 records for release by November.

But a judge asked the agency on Monday to focus more of its resources on the undisclosed Clinton emails and less on other Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Jason Leopold, the Vice News reporter whose lawsuits forced the publication of Clinton's original 30,000 emails.

Leopold had requested a wide variety of Clinton records from the State Department, and included the FBI documents in his case after the investigation yielded additional emails.

More than a half-dozen FOIA lawsuits are seeking Clinton-related records in the seven weeks before voters head to the polls. However, the State Department has repeatedly argued that its FOIA resources are already stretched too thin when asked to speed up the review process in order to accommodate the political pressures of the election.