SPOKESMAN IS COOL WITH 75 YEAR ESTIMATE
Emails are being sought for Clinton aides Sullivan, Mills, Kennedy and Pagliano, and State already announced last month that they lost all emails from Bryan Pagliano, the IT specialist who set up the private server. Quite convenient how that happened.
Also, DoS has systems that scan and categorize emails. Moreover, federal law requires all records be kept accessible for FOI and audit purposes. What State is admitting here is that they are not in compliance with FITARA, FISMA, and Privacy Act requirements. We already knew that to be the case when an employee, Hillary Clinton, was able to bypass established network security protocol. Incompetence could be an adequate explanation for non-compliance, but incompetence does not explain an organized, agency-wide cover up.
HERE'S A SCREENSHOT FROM THE COURT FILING
Sources: Free Beacon, CNN
Mark Toner, the deputy spokesman for the State Department, was grilled by AP reporter Matt Lee during a press briefing Tuesday over the statement that it will take 75 years to release many emails from top aides to then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton after the Republican National Committee made a Freedom of Information Act request for the emails. That length of time came in a court filing made by attorneys for the State Department in response to the request. Lee said almost every other document that the government releases takes far less time to produce, even classified documents. In January, the State Department’s internal watchdog released a report heavily criticizing the agency for its pattern of slow and inaccurate responses to FOIA requests.
"Given the Department's current FOIA 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 argued in the filing.