State Department claims processing Clinton records request would take 75 years

A

anatta

100% recycled karma
The State Department has told a federal court that processing a Republican National Committee demand for documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her aides would take as long as 75 years – and would stretch “generations.”

The department made the argument in a bid to fight the request, just one of several legal battles still unfolding over the former secretary of state’s personal email use.

The RNC had sued the department back in March for the records. The party is seeking years’ worth of emails for top Clinton aides including former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, adviser Jacob Sullivan and Bryan Pagliano, an IT specialist who helped set up Clinton’s server and struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department in the ongoing FBI probe.

A court filing last Wednesday before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia estimated that -- not counting the Pagliano request – processing the records would take 75 years, considering the time it takes to review what would be hundreds of thousands of pages.

“FOIA requests are not supposed to be labored over for generations,” said the court filing, which sought summary judgment on the basis the RNC request was too broad and burdensome.

State Department officials defended the court filing on Tuesday.

Spokesman Mark Toner told Fox News the claim it could take 75 years is “not an outlandish estimation, believe it or not.”

Meanwhile, Pagliano also moved Tuesday to keep his own records under wraps in a separate case.

The ex-staffer who set up Clinton's home email server filed documents under seal in response to a judge's directive that he reveal his immunity arrangement with the Justice Department.

The motion was hidden from public view, and two exhibits were also sealed.

Pagliano last week said he would not testify in an upcoming deposition sought by conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has sued for information about Clinton's email server.

In response, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan gave Pagliano until Tuesday evening to file with the court a copy of his immunity agreement.

On another front, the State Department said Tuesday that Clinton’s use of private email was not widely known, further undercutting claims she made as recently as Sunday.

Speaking with ABC News, Clinton said, “Everybody in the department knew that I was emailing from a personal address. Hundreds of people knew it.”

Toner, though, said Tuesday that “really no one among the senior staff had a full and comprehensive knowledge of how much she was using her personal email and if they had, they probably would have done it differently.”

The State Department was responding to questions about the deposition of aide Stephen Mull in a civil lawsuit. Mull, who ran Clinton's office, said he couldn't remember when he first learned about her private email, or why he suggested she get a government email account instead.

Fox News’ Catherine
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...nton-records-request-would-take-75-years.html
 
slow-walking / 5th amendment filings under seal / "can't recall" / "generations to review".....
 
The State Department has told a federal court that processing a Republican National Committee demand for documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her aides would take as long as 75 years – and would stretch “generations.”


The implications of this line are mind boggling. Basically according to state the clintons are now immune from any public accountabiity or oversight as the documents needed for that would not be given until well after they are dead and forgotten.

This is insane. Why do we have an FOI bill in the first place?
 
anatta said:
The State Department has told a federal court that processing a Republican National Committee demand for documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her aides would take as long as 75 years – and would stretch “generations.”
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the shit flows deep.......really, really deep......
 
State has been erasing minutes of briefings of late. Reporters question the claim the Iran deal was done with transparency.
Jan Psaki (sp?) is another State minion of Clinton -she's now gone -but she denied it,
and now the minutes of the press conference have been erased. Then there are the IRS scrunity of tax exempt orgs -overwhelmingly against RW.

The shit is indeed deep,and that is a major reason to change parties -
the governing party doesn't answer to the people anymore under the Dems; Obama's "transparency" is a sick joke.
Clinton is a continuation of that.
 
Celticguy said:
This is silly. It wouldn't take 75 years to provide a transcript in illuminated script.
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the claim is they are overwhelmed with FOIA requests. each document has to be screened and redacted,and there are 100,000 pages.

which brings up the idea if you have all this paperwork and you really can't access it timely...why even have it.
But it's yet another Democratic Slow walk ..this is the (actual) state response though for the FOIA requests.
 
anatta said:
the claim is they are overwhelmed with FOIA requests. each document has to be screened and redacted,and there are 100,000 pages.

which brings up the idea if you have all this paperwork and you really can't access it timely...why even have it.
But it's yet another Democratic Slow walk ..this is the (actual) state response though for the FOIA requests.
Click to expand...

It's already been done once. Not buying it.
 
Original story: Trade is a hot issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. But correspondence from Hillary Clinton and her top State Department aides about a controversial 12-nation trade deal will not be available for public review — at least not until after the election. The Obama administration abruptly blocked the release of Clinton’s State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.

The decision came in response to International Business Times' open records request for correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative. The request, which was submitted in July 2015, specifically asked for all such correspondence that made reference to the TPP.

The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.

Clinton’s shifting positions on the TPP have been a source of controversy during the campaign: She repeatedly promoted the deal as secretary of state but then in 2015 said, "I did not work on TPP," even though some leaked State Department cables show that her agency was involved in diplomatic discussions about the pact. Under pressure from her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Clinton announced in October that she now opposes the deal — and has disputed that she ever fully backed it in the first place.


While some TPP-related emails have been released by the State Department as part of other open records requests, IBT’s request was designed to provide a comprehensive view of how involved Clinton and her top aides were in shaping the trade agreement, and whether her agency had a hand in crafting any particular provisions in the pact. Unions, environmental organizations and consumer groups say the agreement will help corporations undermine domestic labor, conservation and other public interest laws.

If IBT's open records request is fulfilled on the last day of November, as the State Department now estimates, it will have taken 489 days for the request to be fulfilled. According to Justice Department statistics, the average wait time for a State Department request is 111 days on a simple request — the longest of any federal agency the department's report analyzed. Requests classified as complex by the State Department can take years.

Earlier this year, the State Department’s inspector general issued a report slamming the agency’s handling of open records requests for documents from the Office of the Secretary. Searches of emails “do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness,” the inspector general concluded.

Last year, a Government Accountability Office report found that at the agencies it surveyed, there was not political interference in responding to open records requests. However, last month, a conservative group filed a lawsuit alleging that an Obama administration directive has deliberately slowed the response to open records requests that deal with politically sensitive material.

Nate Jones of the National Security Archive told IBT that whether or not the State Department’s move to delay the release of TPP-related correspondence is politically motivated, it reflects a systemic problem at the agency.

“In my opinion it is more incompetence than maliciousness, but either way, it is a gross error by FOIA processors to not get these documents out before the election,” said Jones, whose group helps journalists obtain government records. “Their inefficiency is doing great harm to the democratic process.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/political-ca...se-hillary-clinton-era-tpp-emails-until-after
 
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, seems reluctant to take a firm position on an issue dividing her party: whether President Obama should have fast-track trading authority for the immense trade deal he has been negotiating, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. With some progressive voters eyeing her with some skepticism, and facing a challenge (such as it is) from candidates on her left, she is being advised to tack in that direction.

President Obama has been pushing hard for the deal, while Democrats in the House of Representatives on Friday revolted and voted against a key part of the legislation. One told me, "there was a very strong concern about the lost jobs and growing income inequality," adding, pointedly: "Ms. Clinton should take notice."

she clearly did. After first dodging the issue, on Sunday in Iowa, Clinton said that "the President should listen to and work with his allies in Congress, starting with (House Minority Leader) Nancy Pelosi, who have expressed their concerns about the impact that a weak agreement would have on our workers, to make sure we get the best, strongest deal possible. And if we don't get it, there should be no deal."

Clinton said, "there are some specifics in there that could and should be changed. So I am hoping that's what happens now -- let's take the lemons and turn it into lemonade."

But as members of the Obama administration can attest, Clinton was one of the leading drivers of the TPP when Secretary of State. Here are 45 instances when she approvingly invoked the trade bill about which she is now expressing concerns:

( see link on 45 shape shifts) http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/15/polit...hed-the-trade-bill-she-now-opposes/index.html
 
The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.
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..just one of those unlucky coincidences ....:whoa:
 
Seahawk said:
I find it hard to believe it would take 75 years.
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It's bullshit. Law firms review millions of pages of documents in a short period for litigation. This is just another attempt to stall/delay by Clinton.

I'm fucking disgusted by the whole thing.
 
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