The State Department doesn’t have enough staff to deal with Freedom of Information Act requests being submitted for Hillary Clinton’s emails, the department said in a Tuesday evening court filing. On top of that, 10 percent of those it hired to do the job have already quit.
The department had said it would hire 50 staffers by February. However, it had hired just 39 as of this month, and four had quit. Of the remaining 35, just 15 have security clearances that make them eligible to actually review sensitive documents. The remaining 20 can do only administrative work.
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Officials are still trying to hire 10 more with the security clearances that would make them capable of more substantive work, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said in the filing, which would bring the number to 45 overall, still short of the earlier goal.
The department is facing more than 30 civil lawsuits from groups seeking records related to Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The department faced 54 lawsuits over unanswered record requests last year, the most of any in the past decade. If the trend holds, 2016 could set another record.
To date, the suits have largely pertained to the more than 60,000 emails that Clinton took with her on the way out the door. She ultimately returned more than 32,000, saying the rest were “personal.” The department finished releasing those messages pursuant to a court order last month, in spite of perennial delays and complaints from the department that it did not have the manpower to do the job in a timely manner.
The department is set to begin releasing emails from Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at State, Huma Abedin, this month. With that release in order, lawsuits over unanswered requests now largely pertain to other records. This month, the Republican National Committee filed six lawsuits over the same number of unanswered requests for things like visitor logs, training manuals and communication that took place between officials at the State Department and other agencies.
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Another group, the nonprofit watchdog Judicial Watch, is suing the department over issues that involve the FOIA process itself. That group is seeking information on who is responsible for responding to record requests, and any potential attempts by Clinton or her staff to hide documents from being subjected to the open records process.
