Clinton: No one has a bigger interest in getting (the e-mails) released than I do.

AFP/Reuters/Washington

The State Department has released a first batch of e-mails by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, relating to Libya and a 2012 militant attack on the US mission in Benghazi.
The e-mails have stoked fresh controversy since Clinton – now running for president in 2016 – admitted to having used a private server and e-mail address during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2012.
State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the release would consist of 296 e-mails, out of 30,000 handed over by Clinton.
They have already been provided to a congressional committee probing the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya in which ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
“These documents span a two-year period from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012 and relate to the security of, and attacks on, the State Department facility in Benghazi and to the United States’ diplomatic presence in Libya, including in Benghazi,” Harf said in a statement.
“The e-mails we release today do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the attacks,” she insisted.
The e-mails were released on the State Department’s website for records released under the Freedom of Information Act, but it was immediately overloaded and difficult to download.
It comes after a judge ordered the State Department to stop dragging its feet and draw up a timetable by Tuesday for handing over the correspondence.
The panel set up by the Republican-controlled Congress is investigating the attack, claiming that the US administration covered up the true circumstances of the assault by dozens of heavily-armed Al Qaeda-linked militants.
Clinton has said she used her own server and e-mail address for “convenience” and has turned over about 30,000 e-mails, amounting to some 55,000 pages, to the State Department.
“No one has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do,” she said earlier this week.
Paper copies of the e-mails were handed over by Clinton in December in 12 large boxes labelled with a rough time stamp for the documents inside.
A State Department team has been digitising them and plowing through the e-mails since March to black out any classified or sensitive information.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said yesterday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had determined that material in Clinton’s e-mails that was once unclassified needed to be classified on later review and said such a decision was not uncommon.
Clinton stressed that the e-mails sent on two private addresses ([email protected] and [email protected]) when she was secretary of state belonged to the State Department.
Clinton said that she had handed over every e-mail relevant to her job as America’s top diplomat and destroyed all the rest, which she maintained were personal, dealing with such matters as her daughter’s wedding, her yoga classes and her mother’s funeral.
But the revelations have played into long-held Republican criticism that she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, are unnecessarily secretive.
Clinton is the clear frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic Party nomination, bidding to make history by becoming the first woman to occupy the Oval Office – and sliding into a seat once occupied by husband Bill Clinton.