In the early hours of Friday morning, the State Department released 1,262 emails from Hillary Clinton's private email account, which she used during her time as Secretary of State to conduct official business.

The publication follows the release of over 3,105 emails on New Year's Eve, and brought the State Department in line with a federal judge's order to release 82 percent of 55,000 pages of emails by January 29. 

Clinton's lawyers handed over the emails to the State Department in December last year, and intelligence officials are poring over them for sensitive information before they are released to the public. Instead of sending a digital download of the emails, which officials could search, Clinton opted to print out all the emails and delivered them in boxes to the department.

Among the emails released on December 31 were 275 documents that the State Department have since upgraded to 'classified' status. One of them was a confidential memo from Sydney Blumenthal dated April 2, 2011, in which he passed on information that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi "has nearly bottomless resources to continue indefinitely."