Happy New Year! State drops 5,500 pages of Clinton emails

The State Department on Thursday afternoon released a batch of 5,500 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails online, in its second-to-last tranche of the former secretary of State's messages. 

 

Thursday's dump — coming the afternoon of New Year's Eve — is the seventh of eight court-ordered releases. 

 

The full 100 percent of her emails are ordered to be released publicly by Jan. 29. 

 

Many of the emails concern personnel matters, such as Clinton congratulating people on new jobs, or recommending people for jobs, overseeing Congressional confirmation of appointees, or nominating employees for awards. 

 

One dated February 2012 showed that as a favor, Clinton got someone named "Bill" to call a former staffer-turned-Maryland-assemblyman to urge him to vote for a gay marriage bill. 

 

"Pls let him know Bill called--unsuccessfully," Clinton writes.

 

Many others are much less serious. 

 

In an April 5, 2012, email with the subject line: "Photo gone viral," Clinton discussed her famous "texts from Hillary" photo showing her in a C-17 aircraft wearing shades and using her Blackberry. 

 

Hillary expressed to aide Cheryl Mills that she was perplexed as to why the photo would go viral, to which Mills replied, "You look cute." 

 

In another email, a friend commented how the "great press" Clinton was getting on "all things sartorial and hair related." 

 

"Who would have thunk it at this stage in our lives. A whole new reason for you to be my hero!" she wrote. 

 

"Ain't it weird? But, I'm not complaining..." Clinton replied. 

 

There were also other surprising revelations -- such as billionaire and liberal donor George Soros telling a Clinton ally he regretted supporting President Obama, and that that German Chancellor Angela Merkel supposedly despised the "Obama phenomenon."

 

The latest posting fell short of a court-ordered end-of-December deadline to release at least 82 percent of the approximately 55,000 relevant pages under a Freedom of Information Act request. 

 

The State Department said Thursday in an email that the agency would release more "sometime next week."  

 

This is not the first time State has missed a benchmark to release Clinton's emails. It also fell short of its timeline in July.

 

The emails released Thursday do not have "fully completed data fields on the FOIA website," the State Department said earlier in the day.

 

This means they can't be easily sorted by subject, sender or recipient — which had been an option in previous email dumps.

 

State said it will add the missing data fields next month.

 

The revelation that Clinton used a private email server for work during her time as secretary of State had dogged the Democratic presidential front-runner in the early months of her candidacy. 

 

Despite the controversy, Clinton still holds a massive lead in the Democratic race. She garners 54.7 percent support nationally, according to a RealClearPolitics average of polls.

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) trails her with 30.7 percent support, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has 4.7 percent.

 

Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Ash Carter admitted that he also used his personal email for work. Carter's revelation has not received the same scrutiny.