On July 21, the Obama administration was set to release thousands of pages of emails from aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen on time—or even close to it.
Lawyers for the administration asked a federal court on Wednesday to delay the release of 14,000 pages of emails … by 27 months.
In a court filing on Wednesday, administration lawyers said the State Department miscalculated the amount of material it would need to process the documents as part of a lawsuit with the conservative organization Citizens United. […]
Citizens United has sued for emails between a handful of State Department officials and people at the Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm, Teneo Consulting, which has ties to the Clintons.
Among other errors, State officials said than an initial test looking at just 300 emails, which was used to calculate the amount of time necessary to process the emails, neglected to include keyword searches of the messages. Instead, they only searched the “To” and “From” lines of the messages, which failed to catch many emails.
State Department officials also “inadvertently” labeled some email attachments as irrelevant to the open records request, without checking them to make sure.
“State deeply regrets these errors, and is working diligently to correct them as quickly as possible,” the lawyers said.
While more than two years may seem like a long time, it’s certainly better than 75 years, which is how long the State Department said it would take to release the emails from Clinton’s top aides during her tenure as secretary of state, which were requested in a separate RNC case. State Department spokesman Mark Toner even defended the absurd timeframe, arguing that it was not an ‘outlandish estimate.’
Regardless, an extension to October 2018 seems quite convenient for the presumptive Democratic nominee, doesn’t it? Citizens United President David Bossie thinks so.
"The American people have a right to see these emails before the election," Bossie told The Daily Caller, calling the delay "totally unacceptable."
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