Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has tweeted that she wants the public to see her emails and that she has asked the State Department to release them to the public. The State Department, however, has said that it will take “several months” to review all 55,000 pages of emails that former Secretary Clinton finally turned over to the Department almost two years after she left office.
I understand that it will take the State Department a fair amount of time to review 55,000 pages of emails, but there is no legal reason why it has to wait until it has reviewed all of the emails before it releases any of them. The State Department can release groups of emails as it finishes reviewing them. Perhaps it could release emails that it has reviewed on a monthly basis – or even better weekly.
Former Secretary Clinton, or some of her many supporters in Congress and the media, would probably claim that doing it that way is unfair. It would enable her critics to be constantly hashing and rehashing the whole question. Two responses. First, it would make the emails easier to go through and to see what is really in them. Is that something they want to avoid? Second, former Secretary Clinton brought this all upon herself. If she had not tried her emails private, people might not be so interested in what’s in them.
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