State Dept. Claims It Would Take 75 Years to Compile Clinton Emails

The State Department claims it would take 75 years to compile the 450,000 pages of emails between Hillary Clinton and her top aides, meaning it will be able to satisfy two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits from the Republican National Committee no later than 2091.

“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,” said a filing from the State Department to the FOIA court, as related by The Hill.

“The volume of FOIA requests received by the Department has tripled since 2008,” complained State Dept. spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau. “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. While we have increased staffing for our FOIA office, our available resources are still nonetheless constrained.”

“That is an incredible number,” another State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, conceded to the Washington Examiner. “It’s a very broad range involving a number of people over a period of four years, and it’s not an outlandish estimation, believe it or not.”

This should conclusively refute the State Department Inspector General’s accusation that the department constantly provides slow, inaccurate, and incomplete responses to FOIA requests – delays that always seem to have the magical result of producing vital information after the November elections. We’ll have this trove of Clinton correspondence in hand with plenty of time to go before the 2092 elections.

It is also nice to see that the State Department is suddenly obsessed with the fine details of handling sensitive correspondence, after Clinton spent years barking at her subordinates to copy-and-paste whatever she needed from the secure document system, stripping away those silly old classification markings as they went.