The State Department's dump of Hillary Clinton's e-mails is here

The State Department has finally released over 3,000 pages worth of official business e-mails HIllary Clinton sent from a personal e-mail account during her stint as US Secretary of State. Last December, Clinton turned 30,000 paper copies of e-mails from the account in question over to the State Department after members of the National Archives and Records Administration expressed concerns that the Presidential hopeful might have violated certain Federal laws regarding official recordkeeping practices.

Earlier today spokesperson John Kirby insisted that the Department’s decision to release the e-mails at 9 PM on a Tuesday was in no way an attempt at avoiding media scrutiny.

“I know that 9 o’clock is a fairly inconvenient time for many of you in the media, and I certainly apologize for the inconvenience that that’s going to cause, but I can assure you and I want to make it very clear from the outset that a 9 o’clock release date is not deliberately intended to make your life harder,” Kirby said in a press release. “I know that’s going to be the going assumption, but it is absolutely not the case.”

In May, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered the State Department to begin releasing Clinton’s e-mails (which total to about 55,000 or so pages) in monthly mass batches for the public to see. According to Kirby, tonight’s massive e-mail dump is the Department’s first step towards complying with Contretas’s ruling.

“We all recognize that turning in our homework at 9 o’clock the night before is probably not ideal,” Kirby quipped in front of a room of journalists unhappy about the nighttime release. “I certainly apologize for the inconvenience that is going to cause.”