Hillary Clinton Email Scandal: Read 296 Of Former Secretary Of State’s Infamous Correspondence

As one of the hundreds of journalists who has filed a Freedom Of Information Act request for some or all of Hillary Clinton’s official emails from her time at the Department of State, I was pretty excited to learn on Friday that the 296 of those correspondences were released in redacted form to the public. State Department officials say that they’ll need months to compile, redact and release tens of thousand of more emails. For reporter’s like me who want specific topics (my FOIA is immigration related), we’ll have to wait. For now, we can dig through this first batch of messages between Clinton and her staff, most of which are related to the Benghazi embassy attack.

You Can Read Redacted Messages From The First Round Of Emails Here

The State Department has said that it can’t process all of Clinton’s 55,000 emails until January of 2016. Each email has to be reviewed, and redacted to protect names and places that might still be classified. However, a U.S. district judge ruled on Tuesday that the State Department can and must release batches of the emails as they become available. A presidential candidate and a front-runner in the Democratic primary, Clinton is expected to match up a Republican challenger next year. Fodder from Clinton’s emails might offer embarrassing moments from her tenure as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.

“I’m glad the emails are starting to come out,” Clinton told reporters at a campaign event on Friday. “This is something that I’ve asked to be done, as you know, for a long time. And those releases are beginning. I want people to be able to see all of them.”

Republicans reviewing Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi attacks have said that the emails released to them don’t tell the whole story.

“There are gaps of months and months and months,” Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” in March. “It strains credibility to believe if you’re on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there is not a single document to turn over to Congress.”