The Note: The Curious Case of 50,000 Pages of Hillary Clinton E-Mails

— -- By MICHAEL FALCONE

NOTABLES

--JUDGE REJECTS STATE DEPARTMENT'S PROPOSED 2016 RELEASE DATE: A federal judge yesterday rejected the State Department's proposal to wait until January 2016 to release over 50,000 pages of e-mails written by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ordering instead a "rolling production" of documents every two months, ABC's JUSTIN FISHEL and MIKE LEVINE report. In response to a Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit filed by Vice News, the State Department on Monday had filed a declaration with Washington D.C.'s U.S. District Court arguing that the process of reviewing the emails is so arduous and time-consuming that it should have until January, 15 2016 to release them. Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled against that request yesterday, ordering instead that the department has until May 26 to produce a new production schedule for the releasing Clinton's emails. http://abcn.ws/1JwjvYt

--WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? It's not clear when the State Department will have to begin releasing the emails, FISHEL and LEVINE note. However, the decision that emails be slowly released over time may actually be more favorable to Clinton's presidential campaign than the State Department's original proposal, which was to release all of them just two weeks before the primary election season gets into full swing. State Department officials told ABC News that 300 emails relating to the Benghazi terror attack could be made public as soon as this week. http://abcn.ws/1JwjvYt

--WHAT HILLARY IS SAYING: "I have said repeatedly I want those emails out," Clinton said during a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday. "Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do. I respect the State Department. They have their process that they do for everybody and not just for me, but anything that they might do to expedite that process I heartily support."

--DEEP WITHIN THE STATE DEPARTMENT LIES A SMALL FACTORY OF WORKERS tasked with the laborious task of sorting, reading, redacting and reviewing paper copies of what now amounts to hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. The unenviable task falls to the State Department's Office of Information Programs and Services and its lawyers, better known as the FOIA office -- which stands for Freedom of Information Act. They've established a full-time staff, with one project manager, two case analysts, nine FOIA reviewers and a slew of additional information analysts who have been working since April. The text they must analyze includes 55,000 pages encompassing more than 30,000 emails from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email account, spanning from 2009 to 2013. More details from ABC's JUSTIN FISHEL: http://abcn.ws/1IP1Udz