WASHINGTON: A US federal judge ordered the State Department on Tuesday to inform the court within a week when does it plan to release former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“We take our legal obligations seriously. We will comply with the court order,” State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told a news briefing in Washington hours after the court order.

Mrs Clinton has acknowledged also using her personal email account for sending official, but non-sensitive, messages while she was the secretary of state.

Also read: Clinton’s ‘home-brew’ email server — genius as well as sneaky

The emails have become the target of multiple lawsuits, seeking their release.

Her Republican rivals want to see the emails to determine if those could be used in the campaign against her. Mrs Clinton is the leading Democratic candidate for the 2016 presidential election.

Mr Rathke said that there were 55,000 pages of emails, covering the entire span of Secretary Clinton’s time at the State Department.

“We had originally proposed to release them in one block … but the court directed their release within a week,” said the State Department official, adding that the department would follow the court order.

He said the department had originally proposed to start releasing the emails in January next year as it required coordination with other government agencies, but now it will send a new timeframe to the court within a week.

Mr Rathke also said that the department would, as it had originally planned, first release the 900 pages that related to the Ben Ghazi shooting.

On Sept 11, 2012, militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and a Foreign Service officer, Sean Smith.

Reports in the US media claimed that Mrs Clinton used her personal email account to issue instructions as the siege of the compound began. Republican lawmakers have called this “behaviour illegal and unsafe.”

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2015

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