The State Department declared it would take 75 years to release all the emails from top aides to Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The announcement came just a day before the presidential primary on Tuesday, where Hillary Clinton won enough delegates to ensure her the Democratic nomination.
“Given the Department’s current [Freedom of Information Act] workload and the complexity of these documents, it can process about 500 pages a month, meaning it would take approximately 16-and-2/3 years to complete the review of the Mills documents, 33-and-1/3 years to finish the review of the Sullivan documents, and 25 years to wrap up the review of the Kennedy documents — or 75 years in total,” the State Department said in the filing.
Spokesman Mark Toner claimed it wasn’t “an outlandish estimation.”
The news shouldn’t come as a shock to Republicans.
After filing a pair of lawsuits related to Clinton’s emails just last March, Chairman Reince Priebus said “the Obama administration has failed to comply with records requests in a timely manner as required by law.”
State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau defended the bloated bureaucracy, saying “the volume of FOIA requests received by the Department has tripled since 2008. In fiscal year 2015 alone we received approximately 22,000 FOIA requests.”
“The requests are also frequently more complex and seek larger volumes of documents, requiring significantly more time, resources, and interagency coordination,” she continued. “While we have increased staffing for our FOIA office, our available resources are still nonetheless constrained.”
The top aides whose emails are in question are Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, policy advisor Jacob Sullivan, and Foreign Service Officer Patrick Kennedy, who between the three of them have 1.5 million pages of records that the RNC is trying to release through FOIA requests.
This is yet another example of government red tape masquerading as sensible policy, which would be the mantra of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Obama is clearly using the bureaucracy to temporarily shield Hillary from more political fallout, which will inevitably be uncovered, likely sooner than later.
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