State Department Releases Nearly 2,000 Clinton Emails

The State Department has released nearly 2,000 emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton in her first year as Secretary of State, according to officials and the agency's website.

The release Tuesday evening is the first in a federal court-ordered rollout that will make 55,000 pages of Clinton's emails available on the department's website by Jan. 29, 2016.

Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. said in May the State Department should "aspire" to release 7 percent of the documents by the end of June, with an increasing percentage of documents released every 30 days.

It was not clear how many pages were included in the 1,925 emails. Click here to read the emails.

In May, the department released 296 emails from Clinton's private email account related to the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Those emails previously had been released to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which has been investigating the attack for more than a year.

Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has previously said on the campaign trail that she wants the State Department to make all her emails public.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday the correspondence covers from March to December of 2009. The 9 p.m. release time, Kirby said, was not a news dump.

"This is really a function of physics for us," Kirby told reporters. "There is a lot of e- mails to get through, we have a deadline we have to meet, and we are doing everything we can to reach that 7 percent goal for release as ordered by the courts."

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