Court Orders State Department to Release Clinton Emails

A U.S. judge Tuesday ordered the State Department to end its foot-dragging and release thousands of emails from Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, dating back to her time as America's top diplomat.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras instructed that the hub of U.S. global diplomacy must come up with a "schedule for rolling productions of Secretary Clinton's emails" within a week, a State Department official said.

"We take our legal obligations seriously. We'll comply with the order," the agency's press office director Jeff Rathke told reporters.

The judge shot down a request from the diplomatic behemoth to be given until January 2016 to complete its internal review of some 30,000 emails, amounting to about 55,000 pages, handed over by Clinton.

Rathke confirmed that the State Department had "originally proposed" releasing all the emails on mass in January once the review, which includes blacking out any classified material, was finished.

For her part, Clinton renewed a call for the State Department to speed up the process and release the emails sent from her own private server on the private email address hdr22@clintonemail.com during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

"They have their process that they do for everybody, not just for me. But anything they might do to expedite that process, I heartily support," she said, during a campaign stop in Iowa.

"I want the American people to learn as much as we can about the work that I did with our diplomats and our development experts because I think it will show how hard we worked and what we did for our country during the time that I was secretary of state."

Clinton, the former first lady when her husband Bill Clinton was president, has officially thrown her hat into the ring to run for the Democratic nomination for the 2016 presidential elections.

She is seen as a clear frontrunner, with only independent Senator Bernie Sanders having also officially announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party's nomination.

But former senators Jim Webb and Lincoln Chaffee, as well as former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, are reportedly also mulling runs.

The email row has raised concerns about why Hillary Clinton chose not to use a State Department email address to communicate on official diplomatic business.

Rathke confirmed her emails relating to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed, would be the among the first released as most of those had already undergone a review.

They would account for some 300 emails amounting to 900 pages.