State Department officials have blamed delays in publishing Hillary Clinton’s private emails on the “strain” of the workload, but court documents filed Tuesday evening indicate the agency has forbidden anyone without a “top secret” security clearance from screening the emails.
The strict requirements have slowed agency attempts to hire 50 new staffers to speed the process of screening Clinton’s emails, which will be published in batches at the end of each month until January 2016.
In a lengthy declaration to the court, John Hackett, the State Department’s top Freedom of Information Act officer, said just three reviewers have been assigned to the open records office since the agency began recruiting new staff at the beginning of September.
Just two new staff have been added to the team tasked with providing State Department documents to Congress, despite repeated calls from the House Select Committee on Benghazi to hand over records that were requested months ago.
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Hackett said reviewers must have top secret clearance because they “cannot know from the outset whether they will be handling classified information.” The reviewers must also have extensive government experience so they can properly identify different types of information.
Given those requirements, the State Department has only hired 22 of the 84 current and retired government officials who applied for an assignment the office that handles records requests. Many of the new hires are still awaiting training.
A FOIA request filed by Vice News has compelled the agency to publish the entire collection of Clinton’s emails online by the end of Jan. 2016. Court papers filed in that case revealed the extent of the State Department’s staffing woes.
But the State Department won’t have all 50 fully-trained staff in place until “mid-January or February” of next year, despite the order that it finish processing and publishing Clinton’s emails around the same time.
Agency officials have pointed to the explosion of new records requests when attempting to explain their often slow responses.
The State Department received fewer than 6,000 FOIA requests in 2008. Last year, the agency received nearly 20,000, according to the court documents.
While State faced a backlog of 10,965 requests on Sept. 30, 2014, the end of the fiscal year, it had received 18,476 new requests when the fiscal year drew to a close last month.
The agency is presently fending off 92 different FOIA lawsuits, many of which are forcing officials to publish documents on a court-ordered schedule. Nearly 40 of those lawsuits are related to Clinton’s private emails.
The relentless pace of document production has caused problems for the State Department, which has said it does not have enough staffers to keep up with the schedules imposed by federal judges.
Clinton has insisted that she did not mishandle classified material because nothing she transmitted on her private server was marked classified at the time.
However, intelligence community officials have found hundreds of classified emails among the records released so far, raising questions about how sensitive information was protected on the personal network.
Clinton’s emails were apparently backed up to a “cloud” network despite her specific request that no such copies of the records exist. Reports have suggested the cloud was vulnerable to hackers.
The FBI is presently investigating whether Clinton and her team breached national security by circulating classified information on her private network.
