The State Department said it'll hand over emails mentioning Hunter Biden to the New York Times

• The State Department said it'll give the New York Times records regarding Hunter Biden.
• The Times sued the agency in January after it allegedly slow-walked a records request.

The US Department of State said it'll hand over email records mentioning Hunter Biden to the New York Times after the publication sued the federal agency.

In a court filing Friday, David McCraw, a lawyer representing the New York Times, wrote that the State Department had begun identifying records the Times requested through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and agreed to give them to the Times starting in April.

"The State Department has started identifying records responsive to The Times's FOIA requests," McGraw wrote in a letter to the judge overseeing the lawsuit. "It has agreed to begin processing records for production as it continues to identify the remaining responsive records."

The Times sued the State Department in January, alleging the agency failed to respond in a timely manner to two FOIA requests. Kenneth Vogel, a journalist for the Times, requested copies of email correspondence between August 2015 and December 2019 between officials in the US embassy in Romania that mentioned Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden.

Vogel also asked for records mentioning Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden; Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who reportedly gave Biden a $100,000 gift; Rudy Giuliani, who then-President Donald Trump tasked with digging up dirt on Biden in Europe; Devin Archer, another former friend of the president's son who was recently sentenced to a year in prison on a fraud scheme; and more than a dozen other people.

The Times alleged that the State Department violated the law by failing to communicate about the records request in a timely manner. The agency told the Times that it would begin to produce documents for Vogel's requests in April of 2023.

In its own court filing earlier in March, the federal government denied that it had illegally slow-walked the FOIA requests. US District Judge J. Paul Oetken, who's overseeing the case, scheduled a hearing over the lawsuit for March 17.

McGraw said in his letter that there was no need to hold the meeting then, because the State Department had agreed to begin handing over documents. He wrote that each party could provide status updates as they continued to negotiate over how the State Department would fulfill Vogel's requests.

"The parties are still negotiating the number of pages to be processed in and the frequency of each production," McGraw wrote. "The parties respectfully propose to provide a status report to the Court on March 25, 2022, informing the Court of the results of this negotiation."