This discharge of information is the result of a lawsuit filed against the DOJ by the American Council for Law and Justice (ACLJ) in November 2016.
The newly-released emails mostly include DOJ officials’ conversations with reporters, who were seeking comment on the meeting between Lynch and the former president on an airport tarmac in Phoenix, Ariz. in June 2016.
The encounter raised concerns about the impartiality of the DOJ’s investigation into the Hillary Clinton episode, and became a significant issue in the presidential campaign.
The ACLJ notes that under the leadership of then-Director James Comey the FBI had originally denied the existence of such records.
“No records responsive to your request were located,” FBI Chief of Record/Information David Hardy wrote a letter responding to ACLJ’s Freedom of Information Act request.
“For your information, Congress excluded three discrete categories of law enforcement and national security records from the requirements of the FOIA.”
(Exemptions may apply in cases of classified information relating to foreign policy or national defense, trade secrets, and personnel and medical files.)