State Dept. Drops More Clinton Emails Days From Election

The State Department published an additional 1,280 pages of official email belonging to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this afternoon as part of a court-ordered effort to produce some of her more recently discovered correspondence before the presidential election.

The documents come from the nearly 15,000 emails the FBI recovered during its investigation into the Democratic nominee's handling of sensitive information on a controversial private email server.

The State Department said today "a significant number are 'near duplicates' of documents previously provided by former Secretary Clinton" which have already been released to the public.

"For instance, a 'near duplicate' would be substantively identical to previously released emails,but for a top email in the chain stating 'Please print,'" State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner said in an emailed statement.

Some 5,600 of the 15,000 emails turned up by the FBI have been deemed work-related, but it's not clear how many of them actually consist of new material. The State Department is under a court order to release another batch of these emails on Friday and the rest will come in monthly, post-election tranches.

But Clinton's emails woes have moved far beyond this highly-controlled process of releasing official correspondence from her private server. For nearly a month now, her campaign has been faced with a daily onslaught of hacked emails belonging to her campaign chairman John Podesta, published by document-leaking website WikiLeaks.

In addition, the FBI announced last Friday that it has new emails in its possession that may be relevant to its investigation into her handling of classified information on her private server -- essentially re-opening a case that everyone thought had been closed on July 5 -- not to mention throwing a huge wrench into the gears just days before the election.

Ironically, one new email from 2010 offers a suggestion on how Clinton ought to respond to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange after he posted roughly 250,000 State Department cables online.

"We view this not as a 'clever game' of wiki leaks but rather as a 'criminal act' against the United States of America," the email said. "He [presumably Assange] might think this is a clever game today -- but when he is prosecuted and if convicted, he will move from being a clever-cyber thief to a convicted criminal -- and will find out that's a whole different kind of game."

Six years after that email was written, Julian Assange remains free, holed-up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, avoiding extradition to Sweden over a sex-crimes investigation. His site, WikiLeaks, has continued publishing private government and corporate documents it obtains.