State Dept.: 75-year wait for Clinton aide emails

[strategery blunder]

19. Nevertheless the State Department's purported capacity is not reasonable.

500 pages (not documents) per month?

I could read a 500 page government document (or collection thereof) within a few days, including a bit of background research on the subject matter. If I already have some familiarity with the subject matter, I could do it within a day and a half. And I'm a layperson who has done this kind of thing as an exercise in civics to learn more about the workings of our government.

Law firms have to have a lot more review throughput than that. It is reasonable to expect a cabinet-level government agency to have more capacity to review these things than a private law firm, let alone a paltry 500 page per month rate. Hell, an agency the size of State should probably have a division specifically devoted to FOIA requests (at least if transparency was something the department ostensibly took seriously). I respect that there are legal complexities involved that I haven't had to deal with (as the documents I had read were already public), but if the State Department wants to claim its capacity for reviewing documents is so ridiculously low, both plaintiffs and the court have every right to ask why it is so low.