Portions of Clinton emails to be released

The US State Department has proposed releasing portions of 55,000 pages of emails from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton by next January.

The department made the proposal in a federal court filing, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Vice News.

In the filing, department official John Hackett said that following a review of the emails, the department will post the releasable portions of the 55,000 pages on its website.

He said the review will take until the end of the year — and asked the court to adopt a completion date of January 15, 2016, to factor in the holidays.

That is just a couple of weeks before the Iowa caucuses and early state primaries that follow.

Clinton, the Democratic front-runner in the 2016 presidential election, has said she wants the department to release the emails as soon as possible.

The disclosure that she conducted State Department business on a private email account has been a controversy from the very inception of her campaign this year.