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Hillary Clinton's emails won't be released until January 2016 (update)

The emails that Hillary Clinton sent as Secretary of State from a private account will eventually be released to the public, but not as quickly as some had hoped. Government lawyers reportedly revealed in new court papers, filed in relation to a Vice News Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, that the correspondence won't be published until January 15th, 2016. That's a long wait, especially as Clinton has already launched her 2016 presidential campaign in the US. Her privately-controlled email address, first revealed by the New York Times, is an issue because she used it for all of her work-related correspondence. Under federal law, emails sent and received by officials are supposed to be archived so that oversight committees, historians and the press can examine them.

Update: Another update from Vice notes that a judge has ordered the State Department to release emails on a rolling basis.

The former Secretary of State has since handed over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department and stressed that she wants them to be released "as soon as possible." As Vice News reports, the new court documents filed on Monday reveal that sorting and analysing the emails has proven quite the challenge for the government, and that the team working on them won't be finished until the end of the year. Clinton is undoubtedly keen to get this whole episode behind her, but until the messages are released, the criticism surrounding her actions and the content of the emails is unlikely to subside.

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