U.S. State Department to release final Hillary Clinton email batch

Washington: The U.S. State Department said it would release the final batch of Hillary Clinton`s emails from her time at the department`s helm later on Monday evening, meeting an extended deadline set by a federal judge.

The release of the remaining 1,700 emails yet to be made public does not mark the end of a controversy that has dogged Clinton`s campaign to be elected president in November since her use of a private email server in her home first came to light a year ago.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken the server and U.S. Department of Justice attorneys are investigating whether laws were broken through the unusual arrangement. The State
Department`s inspector general and at least two Republican-led congressional committees are doing similar inquiries. 

The State Department itself is investigating how much of the information in more than 1,800 emails now marked as classified was classified at the time it was sent, in breach of government
rules. 

Members of the public are still fighting the department in court for access to thousands of public records connected to some of Clinton`s closest aides. And just last week a
Democrat-appointed federal judge granted a request by a conservative group suing the State Department under open records laws to seek sworn testimonies from department officials and
Clinton aides later this year to see whether the arrangement was intended to thwart public access to government records.

State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday that an additional email between Clinton and President Barack Obama was being withheld in full from the public, bringing the total number to 19, and that an additional email was being withheld in full at the request of an unspecified law-enforcement agency.

The emails will be released at 6 p.m. EST on Monday (2300 GMT), the State Department said.

Clinton, the Democratic front runner in the presidential campaign, has said her email arrangement broke no rules and that the government will vindicate her, and says she welcomes
the public release of the roughly 30,000 work emails she returned to the government in 2014. 

Lawyers for the State Department told a federal judge last week they still did not know who in the government authorized Clinton`s email arrangement or why, almost a year after its existence became public. Clinton has said the arrangement was for her convenience, but that she now regrets it.