The State Department on Tuesday defended its claim that releasing all the emails sought by the Republican National Committee (RNC) would take 75 years.
“It’s not an outlandish estimation, believe it or not,” spokesman Mark Toner told reporters Tuesday.
{mosads}“It’s an enormous amount of FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests,” he added. “Very broad and very complex.”
The RNC has sued the State Department under FOIA, seeking all emails to or from four aides to former Secretary Hillary Clinton from 2009 to 2013.
The State Department has claimed that the result would yield roughly 1.5 million pages of documents that it and other federal agencies would need to go through page by page.
The department claimed in a court filing last week trying to kill the lawsuit that the emails are “complex” and include “classified documents and interagency communications that could have to be referred to other agencies for their review.”
After discussion with the government, the RNC offered to impose some limits on the subject matter and dates of the emails of three aides, to pare the list of emails down to roughly 450,000 pages.
Because the State Department expected that it could process roughly 500 pages per month, processing all 450,000 pages would take 900 months, or 75 years.
And that doesn’t include the emails of Bryan Pagliano, the IT expert believed to have set up and maintained Clinton’s private email server throughout her tenure at the State Department.
The other three officials whose records were requested are Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, senior adviser Jacob Sullivan and undersecretary for management Patrick Kennedy.