Some people raised eyebrows when in response to a freedom of information request the state department said it would take 75 years to review a Clinton aide’s emails.
Mind you, that’s not a review of all the emails, just some of them.
In a follow-up report, the state departments says its 75-Year Estimate “Not Outlandish”
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.
“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.
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.
Since 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 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.
Nothing to Hide
Productivity Math
- 500 pages a month.
- 20 working days a month.
- 25 pages a day.
- 3.125 pages per hour
Some may find that hard to believe. However, we are talking about government bureaucrats that have a vested interest in not releasing any data.
It could easily take twice that long.
In 75 years, how many of those documents could possibly be security risks of any kind? Nonetheless, if given the mandate, bureaucratic wizards probably would take the time, and then some.
Can a robot do this somehow? Then again, what the heck is the RNC going to do with 1.5 million pages most of which are likely nothing but complete drivel.
This whole thing would best be handled by an indictment by the FBI. There is already plenty of evidence for that.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
