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

[karynnj]

45. I think Kerry has handled this entire mess as well as could have done.

He temporarily expanded the FOIA department by "cannibalizing" FOIA trained lawyers from other parts of the State Depart to deal with HRC's 55,000 emails. He also asked the IG to investigate both what happened and how they should archive email going forward.

What is clear is that the FOIA department in the State Department never before had to deal with processing all the email of a past Secretary of State. Not to mention, that even before he started, the State Department was slow processing even narrower media FOIA requests. It may be that part of this is the nature of State Department work requires more careful processing than say HUD. It also might have meant that even when he arrived, the department was too small.

Then came the HRC email problem - and HRC cavalierly asking the State Department to make it all public online. (Not to mention, even if she had not done that, many in the media likely would have requested all of it.) This was an enormous, very sensitive request. Kerry did three things - he asked the IG to investigate, he approved expanding the department, and he put someone in charge of it who had been a career staff person, not a political appointment. The FOIA department was 12 people and they expanded to (I think) near 50 - pulling FOIA trained lawyers from other parts of the State Department. From many accounts, those people worked long hours and weekends to do all that was needed.

I think it might have been more strategic not to give a 75 year estimate, but rather to point out that if it took a year to process 55,000 pages - processing 450,000 people - even if they could continue to use everyone pulled from other jobs - could take longer than the the potential 8 years a Hillary Clinton Presidency. Not to mention, realistically how many of the people in that group would stay in that job if they saw that - rather than being an exception - they would have to continue working under that pressure for years.

It is unfortunate that Kerry has had to deal with cleaning up this mess, but few will blame him for creating it or making it worse. The blame will be split -- with Democrats blaming the right for outrageous fishing expeditions asking for mountains of sensitive State Department information -- and Republicans mostly blaming Clinton.