Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus is calling on the State Department to release recently found emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure before the November elections.
“With growing evidence of pay-to-play relationships between Clinton’s State Department and her family foundation, the State Department owes it to the American people to release the thousands of work-related emails she failed to turn over before voters head to the polls,” Priebus said in a statement Wednesday.
{mosads}“If the State Department continues to withhold these emails, Hillary Clinton should demand they be released, or release them herself. Anything less than a full release of these public records before voting begins will only further prove that we have a rigged system that has one set of rules [for] political elites and another for everyone else.”
Priebus accused Clinton of lying to the American people “in order to hide her unethical and reckless conduct as secretary of State while furthering her own self-interest.”
“Our country cannot afford further erosion of the public’s faith in our institutions because of the unseemly and deep collusion between the Obama administration and their anointed successor Hillary Clinton.”
The State Department has released thousands of emails from Clinton’s private server as part of a court order. The former secretary deleted about 30,000 other messages that she said were personal, but the FBI recovered some additional work-related emails during its investigation of the server, and those have not been set for release.
The FBI says it has found “several thousand” such messages, but the department has not committed to a schedule for their release.
“As we have just received this material from the FBI, we are still assessing what our process will look like,” State spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau told The Hill on Tuesday.
Multiple Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits have been filed to make the emails public, which only a federal judge can order.
The FBI recovered an unspecified number emails during its yearlong investigation into Clinton’s email setup, which ultimately ended with no recommendation of criminal charges.