A federal judge would never issue an order saying, “Cut the crap!,” but that is the gist of what Judge Rudolph Contreras just told the Department of State.  Stephen Dinan reports in the Washington Times:

A federal judge told the State Department to speed up the final release of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, saying the voting public has an interest in seeing them as the primaries are underway.

Judge Rudolph Contreras said the government is taking an “unreasonably long” time processing the messages and is already more than a week overdue on making them all public — and said he didn’t like being told speeding up could hurt national security. (snip)

The judge said he will order at least some emails to be released by Feb. 18, and showed little patience with the department’s delays.

“To state the obvious, these documents have a lot of interest and the timing is important,” Judge Contreras said.

Readers will recall that last month the State Department told the judge that it had discovered 4,000 messages it somehow had overlooked and used this “discovery” as the reason for delaying release.

The fundamental problem here is that the sort of remedy federal judges use in enforcing their orders is jailing those who flout them.  But jailing John Kerry is out of the question.  Thus, Judge Contreras stated, “Government has me between a rock and a hard place.”

Just as with her Goldman Sachs transcripts, Hillary has some pretty embarrassing (or incriminating) material to hide.

Federal judges do not like being played.  It will be interesting to see what happens next.