State Department Says It Is 'Strained to the Limit' With Clinton Emails

The State De­part­ment of­fice tasked with the time-de­vour­ing chore of sift­ing through thou­sands of Hil­lary Clin­ton’s emails needs re­in­force­ments.

Badly.

In a court fil­ing Tues­day, State said its Free­dom of In­form­a­tion Act of­fice is “strained to the lim­it” amid the “enorm­ous un­der­tak­ing” of vet­ting Clin­ton’s mes­sages for pub­lic re­lease and sim­ul­tan­eously deal­ing with a huge in­flux of new re­quests over the past year.

The fil­ing is part of a law­suit by Vice News re­port­er Jason Leo­pold, whose case has be­gun pry­ing loose Clin­ton’s mes­sages but is also seek­ing emails of sev­er­al of her former top aides.

Ac­cord­ing to Tues­day’s fil­ing, State had nearly 11,000 FOIA re­quests pending at the end of fisc­al year 2014, and since then over 16,500 new re­quests have poured in.

The on­go­ing re­view and re­lease of roughly 30,000 mes­sages that Clin­ton turned over to the de­part­ment, which State is re­leas­ing in monthly batches un­der a judge’s or­der, are con­sum­ing a “sig­ni­fic­ant por­tion” of State’s FOIA pro­cessing re­sources, the fil­ing states.

But help is on the way.

Re­u­ters re­por­ted Tues­day night that State hopes to move about 50 work­ers from else­where in the de­part­ment in­to the FOIA of­fice to deal with the back­log in pub­lic-re­cords re­quests.

“The ex­tra staff will not work on the monthly, court-ordered re­lease of Clin­ton emails, which are be­ing handled by about 20 per­man­ent and 30 part-time work­ers, of­fi­cials said. The new staff will fill in for those work­ers and may also handle oth­er Clin­ton FOIA re­quests,” Re­u­ters re­ports.

The news ser­vice ob­tained a Sept. 2 State De­part­ment no­tice to em­ploy­ees seek­ing people with skills that in­clude the abil­ity to de­cide what in­form­a­tion may be de­clas­si­fied and re­leased.

A State De­part­ment of­fi­cial, con­firm­ing the plan, told Na­tion­al Journ­al that State’s FOIA case­load has in­creased more than 300 per­cent since 2008.

“In an ef­fort to meet these in­creas­ing de­mands, the de­part­ment is act­ively adding ad­di­tion­al staff to our FOIA of­fice team. These ad­di­tion­al staff mem­bers will work on a range of dif­fer­ent FOIA re­quests. We be­lieve this is a wise and prudent step to pro­mote trans­par­ency and re­spons­ive­ness,” the of­fi­cial said.

State also an­nounced Tues­day that Sec­ret­ary of State John Kerry has named Janice Jac­obs, a former seni­or de­part­ment of­fi­cial, to the new job of “trans­par­ency co­ordin­at­or,” where she’ll work on “im­prov­ing our sys­tems for re­spond­ing to Free­dom of In­form­a­tion Act and con­gres­sion­al re­quests faster and more ef­fi­ciently.”

However, State found it­self on the de­fens­ive over the choice of Jac­obs when re­ports sur­faced that she donated $2,700 to Clin­ton’s pres­id­en­tial cam­paign in June.

Jac­obs, asked about the dona­tion by the As­so­ci­ated Press, noted she was re­tired at the time and did not ex­pect to re­join the de­part­ment.

But Re­pub­lic­ans re­main skep­tic­al that she is the right per­son for the job.

“Put­ting a maxed out Clin­ton donor in charge of over­see­ing the pro­cess of re­leas­ing her emails doesn’t just give the ap­pear­ance of a con­flict of in­terest, it is one,” said Re­pub­lic­an Na­tion­al Com­mit­tee spokes­man Mi­chael Short.