WASHINGTON — The State Department has failed to deliver nearly 70 pages of documents to The Associated Press, as instructed by a federal judge, about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s hiring of longtime aide Huma Abedin as a special government contract staffer. The department provided only seven pages of emails.

Meanwhile, government lawyers asked another judge to delay releasing thousands of pages of documents from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state until January 2016.

The State Department’s request to delay until next year its release of emails and other Clinton-related documents sought by news media and legal and political organizations raised the prospect that significant information about Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state might not surface until after presidential nomination contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Impatient with years of previous delays from the State Department over requests by the AP for emails and documents from Clinton and several of her top aides, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon set a strict schedule for release of the material last month that included an order to deliver to the AP an estimated 68 pages of documents related to Abedin by Tuesday.

The department instead provided only five documents, two of them partially censored.

In a filing in a separate court case against the State Department, government lawyers cautioned that the agency’s resources for processing requests for Clinton-related files “are strained to the limit.”

The State Department’s latest push to delay release of the Clinton-related emails came as agency’s spokesman said there was no conflict of interest in the decision to appoint a retired diplomat, Janice Jacobs, to oversee the State Department’s handling of information requests even though she had made a $2,700 donation to Clinton’s presidential campaign in June.

A State Department spokesman acknowledged that the department was unaware of Jacobs’ donation to Clinton before Secretary of State John Kerry selected her.