(CNN) A federal judge has prioritized the Justice Department's public release of witness interview summaries from Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, suggesting Wednesday that more document releases related to notable witnesses such as Roger Stone may be made public in the coming months, before other documents from the Mueller investigation come out.
Federal Judge Reggie Walton's notes to the Justice Department came Wednesday after lawsuits from CNN and BuzzFeed prompted the Justice Department to begin releasing FBI witness memos from the Mueller investigation. The document production, under the Freedom of Information Act, so far contains some of the most substantial details to emerge from the Mueller investigation since the special counsel issued his final report.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department sent the two news organizations more than 200 pages of witness notes from Mueller's interviews with former Trump campaign advisers Steve Bannon and Rick Gates and with Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
Walton on Wednesday urged the Justice Department's Freedom of Information Act unit to find ways to make the 800 interview summaries, known as 302s, publicly available more quickly.
He also told the Justice Department to look into the burden of releasing the narratives that Roger Stone's attorneys received during his trial preparations. Walton said he could set a deadline to release these documents in January. He also discussed at the hearing the possibility of the Justice Department releasing summaries that the House has seen from key Mueller witnesses, including those from White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, White House aide Stephen Miller and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
The Justice Department maintains that its FOIA office is looking for more people and technological help to process the tens of thousands of Mueller-related FOIA requests more quickly. But at this point, an attorney for Justice Department said, they can't do much more than process 500 pages a month to satisfy CNN's request for the interview summaries.
Many FOIA requests that BuzzFeed sued over are now on hold as the Justice Department works on these.
CNN's narrow lawsuit over Mueller 302s is in a combined lawsuit with BuzzFeed's broad request for many types of Mueller documents.
Walton will hold another hearing on which documents they're releasing to CNN and BuzzFeed, as well as how quickly they can do that, on November 25.
UPDATE: This story has been updated with additional context about the judge's actions concerning the release of documents.