Benghazi panel handed trove of emails from Clinton aide

The State Department has turned over 1,200 pages of emails from one of Hillary Clinton’s top aides to the House panel investigating the deadly Benghazi attacks.

The documents represent “partial compliance on the subpoena for one of the seventh-floor principal’s emails,” a spokesman for the House Select Committee on Benghazi told The Hill.

{mosads}State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach said the 1,200 emails were produced in response to a subpoena the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued in March. The delivery of the emails was first reported by Bloomberg.

“The Department produced an additional 1200 pages of emails to the Committee last Friday from Secretary Clinton’s staff,” Gerlach wrote in a statement Wednesday.

The documents are different from the 55,000 that Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner, turned over to State from the private email server she used while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.

Of those, around 300 were related to security conditions in Libya and the Benghazi siege. Those emails, given to the select committee in February, were made public on Friday.

Earlier this month, a congressional aide said panel Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) had “hands down” placed a premium on getting additional emails from a group of 10 State Department principals, including Clinton, before he would consider scheduling her to appear before the committee.

The panel requested the communications from aides in November and issued a subpoena for them in March. The request included messages from some of Clinton’s closest aides, including Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and Philippe Reines. It also covered Wendy Sherman, Patrick Kennedy, William Burns, Jeffrey Feltman and Thomas Nides.

Without those records “it becomes difficult to question because how do you close the loop?” the aide asked.

While it is unclear whose records were turned over the select committee, panel member Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) last week suggested that Adebin, the vice chairwoman of Clinton’s presidential campaign, could be deposed soon.

Also on Wednesday, a District of Columbia judge ordered the State Department to release Clinton’s emails in batches ever 30 days, rejecting an agency plan to roll them out in early 2016.

The first release must contain at least 7 percent of Clinton’s message traffic, the judge ordered, and State must provide weekly updates detailing the number of pages released from the total cache.

Questions over Clinton’s use of a private server while serving as secretary of State have dogged her candidacy since she entered the White House race last month.

Republicans have accused the Obama administration of stonewalling their investigation of the Benghazi attacks, and had floated the possibility of withholding funding from parts of the State Department if emails were not provided.

Clinton has said she wants the emails released to the public as quickly as possible, and has urged State to speed up the process.

— This story was updated at 5 p.m.