State Dept.: 75-year wait for Clinton aide emails
Source: CNN
Washington (CNN)The Republican National Committee would have to wait 75 years for the State Department to release emails from top aides to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to a recent court filing.
State Department lawyers argue in a filing made last Wednesday that gathering 450,000 pages of records requested for former Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Jacob Sullivan and top State Department official Patrick Kennedy would take three quarters of a century.
"Given the Department's current FOIA workload and the complexity of these documents, it can process about 500 pages a month, meaning it would take approximately 16-and-2/3 years to complete the review of the Mills documents, 33-and-1/3 years to finish the review of the Sullivan documents, and 25 years to wrap up the review of the Kennedy documents -- or 75 years in total," the State Department argued in the filing.
State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau declined Monday to comment on the RNC lawsuit specifically, but said that requests have tripled since 2008 and staff has been spread thin.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/06/politics/clinton-emails-75-years/
sister_rosa_refried
(447 posts)Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)you will be totally down with it?
TheBlackAdder
(28,186 posts).
Disney and most other firms made most of their money swiping things from the public domain.
Yet, corporations don't want to allow that same benefit to others... for the sake of profits.
Both Democrats and Republicans jointly extended these terms, and when they near expiry, they'll be extended further.
.
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)for unethical and immoral behavior.
For what it is worth, I have a copyright reform law that I think would be quite fair to the public.
Copyrights are for 25 years from moment of creation whether registered or not. At the end of 25 years, you have an option to extend for 5 more years, however, a surtax of 10% is applied to all revenue generated from the extended copyright. The surtax goes up 10% every time the copyright is extended for 5 more years.
The public domain problem becomes self-correcting.
Locrian
(4,522 posts)Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)Travis_0004
(5,417 posts)Try back in 75 years. Any idea what their response would be?
cstanleytech
(26,286 posts)they dont contain anything classified or contain anything considered sensitive to the government.
If they dont then you better just turn them over otherwise the IRS will have your butt.
Travis_0004
(5,417 posts)Of course need to go over a document to make sure its not privileged. I am required to follow all the rules in IRS circular 230.
Of course, the IRS will send me a notice, and I'm required to respond in 14 days. Will they respond to me in 14 days? Hell no.
HooptieWagon
(17,064 posts)Let's start attaching jail time to avoiding/stalling FOIA filings and see how quickly they're complied with,
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)MisterFred
(525 posts)Democrats, or anyone who cares about civil liberties, should not promote a weak FOIA, like you're doing. FOIA as a whole, and various government agencies' desire to avoid their responsibilities, is bigger than this useless fishing expedition by the Rs.
Unless you think they'll find something?
I don't.
The Rs prefer this headline to actually getting the e-mails.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)on top of many other requests, it's making me rethink the whole thing.
The State Department has a lot more important things to do than respond to endless Rethug fishing requests.
"E-mails sent by former Secretary of State X that are public records under FOIA" is not an unreasonable request. Number of documents should be irrelevant to whether the agency fulfills its duties. What would they have to hire, one or two people to get that kind of request done in a year or two? At most. The State Department SHOULD have a big FOIA department. The fact they don't shows how much they're using "burden" to avoid FOIA requests - especially the ones that aren't bullshit like this one.
You're letting the Republicans alter your values. Don't give them that kind of power. Unless you didn't care about open government in the first place.
(For consistency's sake, it's not 450,000 documents. It's apparently that many pages... however they're counting pages.)
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)strategery blunder
(4,225 posts)500 pages (not documents) per month?
I could read a 500 page government document (or collection thereof) within a few days, including a bit of background research on the subject matter. If I already have some familiarity with the subject matter, I could do it within a day and a half. And I'm a layperson who has done this kind of thing as an exercise in civics to learn more about the workings of our government.
Law firms have to have a lot more review throughput than that. It is reasonable to expect a cabinet-level government agency to have more capacity to review these things than a private law firm, let alone a paltry 500 page per month rate. Hell, an agency the size of State should probably have a division specifically devoted to FOIA requests (at least if transparency was something the department ostensibly took seriously). I respect that there are legal complexities involved that I haven't had to deal with (as the documents I had read were already public), but if the State Department wants to claim its capacity for reviewing documents is so ridiculously low, both plaintiffs and the court have every right to ask why it is so low.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)do than fulfill endless FOIA fishing expeditions that there is no budget for.
strategery blunder
(4,225 posts)that cause it not to have time to "fulfill endless FOIA fishing expeditions that there is no budget for..." oh wait.
I'm sure DU was cheering when government agencies under the shrub said they lacked the capacity to fill FOIA requests...oh wait.
And to use a more recent example, I'm sure the Chicago Police Department had other things to do than digging out and disclosing the incriminating evidence against its officers in the Laquan case, until a judge ordered the department to do so. I'm sure the CPD thought that Laquan's family and their allies were merely on a "fishing expedition."
Government agencies don't get to unilaterally decide these things. Fishing expedition or not, either FOIA compels disclosure of responsive documents or it does not. If bureaucrats could cry "fishing expedition!" every time someone filed a FOIA request, FOIA would be utterly toothless, as if it did not already have plenty of exceptions already.
The term "fishing expedition" is in the eye of the beholder, and it usually means "my adversaries want to compel me to release information." It is little more than political tribalism.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)blackspade
(10,056 posts)Government transparency should be the norm not the exception.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)They're turning FOIA into a tool for keeping the government from doing its job by deluging it with paperwork requests. This is no accident.
And it's not just in the State Department, and not even just in government.
http://www.ucsusa.org/center-science-and-democracy/protecting-scientists-harassment/freedom-bully-how-laws#.V1bcJldOJFJ
Transparency and accountability in government are essential to democracy. The right of citizens to information about how public decisions are made is precious, and open records laws, such as the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), are crucial to protecting that right.
However, the rights guaranteed by open records laws can be abused. As our 2015 report Freedom to Bully shows, open records requests are increasingly being used to harass and intimidate scientists and other academic researchers, or to disrupt and delay their work. Academic institutions and other involved parties need to be prepared to respond to these requests in a way that protects the privacy and academic freedom of researchers while complying with the law and respecting the public's right to information.
The impact of harassment on research
The use of open records laws to harass researchers emerged with the growing use of electronic communications. Conversations that used to take place over the phone or in person are now conducted by email, a format that leaves a permanent record. When these email discussions are made public through records requests, the privacy that academics have long enjoyed in discussions with colleagues is compromised. This can have a chilling effect on the frank exchange of ideas and constructive criticism, a crucial part of the scientific process.
Abuse of open records requests can also hinder researchers simply by hijacking their schedule. Complying with requests may take dozens or even hundreds of hours of researchers' time, putting their real work on hold or on the back burner for a long while. This may often be the main purpose of such requests.
SNIP
blackspade
(10,056 posts)Having worked in public records, I understand abuse, but the State adept is full of shit on '75' years.
There are easy ways to weed out abuse of the system.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)the schedule and budget along with the rest of the important job the Department is supposed to do.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)"...rest of the important job the Department is supposed to do."
They have a public records office that handles FOIA requests.
So your framing of the issue just dodges the problem; that transparency is not a current priority in the Federal government.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)to the limit. If the Rethugs in Congress want to push these fishing expedition FOIA requests, then they should pass a bill increasing the budget.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)former9thward
(31,987 posts)You mean that the State Department is willfully ignoring a federal law? By not providing a budget when they know there will be requests? interesting defense...
Obama administration sets new record for withholding FOIA requests
WASHINGTON The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldnt find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law but only when it was challenged.
Its backlog of unanswered requests at years end grew remarkably by 55 percent to more than 200,000. It also cut by 375, or about 9 percent, the number of full-time employees across government paid to look for records. That was the fewest number of employees working on the issue in five years.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/obama-administration-sets-new-record-withholding-foia-requests/
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)former9thward
(31,987 posts)Show where they have requested a FOIA budget and it was denied by Congress. Remember YOU claimed no such budget exists when the article I cited shows they have people working on requests. I guess they are doing it on their own time ....
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)The State Department is still reeling from deep cuts made by Senate and House appropriations panels to the Obama administrations budget requests for next year, with some officials warning of national security risks.
Andrew Shapiro, assistant secretary of state in its Bureau of Political Military Affairs, told a meeting last week of the Center for New American Security that the hefty cuts will compromise national security. He noted that the 2012 funding bill for State Department and foreign operations was cut 8 percent by the full Senate Appropriations Committee and a whopping 18 percent by the House Appropriations State and Foreign Operations subcommittee.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had sounded similar concern in March, telling the House Foreign Affairs Committee that threatened deep cuts would be devastating to her agency.
former9thward
(31,987 posts)You claimed there is NO FOIA budget. Now you change it to slashed. Which is it?
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)because any budget is FINITE.
And the number of these FOIA's has greatly increased in recent years, while the State Dept administrative budget has not.
http://www.americanpress.com/Congress-Benghazi-Punish
A spokeswoman for the Appropriations panel said the budget plan withholds funds until State develops and implements a plan to reduce a backlog of FOIA and congressional requests.
State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach called the proposal "counterproductive" and said it would further constrain resources needed to meet sharp increases in requests for documents in recent years.
The State Department achieved nearly a 14 percent reduction in its appeals backlog last year, Gerlach said, but the agency's FOIA caseload has more than tripled since 2008 jumping from 6,000 requests to nearly 20,000 last year.
The number of congressional oversight requests has also dramatically increased, Gerlach said.
reddread
(6,896 posts)azurnoir
(45,850 posts)I would have expected no less
forest444
(5,902 posts)Because if, a hundred years from now, somebody sentences some politician to life in prison, what do they care.
mia
(8,360 posts)Why?
WhiteTara
(29,704 posts)If real...the republicans have cut budgets everywhere. This is no exception.
Rhetorical?...you knew that
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)to do than respond to endless FOIA requests from grandstanding Rethugs.
merrily
(45,251 posts)Claiming to need 75 years to comply is bullshit, aka not complying with federal law.
If Democrats were asked a Republican administration, a lot of replies to this would be different and that is indefensible.
MisterFred
(525 posts)Of course it's a bullshit excuse.
Festivito
(13,452 posts)Angel Martin
(942 posts)then they should just scrap the whole thing and stop pretending.
I think this blatant, in your face refusal to comply may get a backlash from the media, as they know that if this stands, it sets a precedent for all future requests.
Skwmom
(12,685 posts)hughee99
(16,113 posts)They should stop pretending they're being open and honest.
Is there anyone who actually believes it would really take this long to process, or does everyone know they're full of shit, but some just don't care?
Angel Martin
(942 posts)is imagine what the reaction would be if a Repub administration announced that it would take 75 years to comply with FIOAs.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)Skwmom
(12,685 posts)Major Hogwash
(17,656 posts)Just claiming that it would take years and years to get that kind of information is ludicrous on the face of it.
Angel Martin
(942 posts)critique of government, the State Dept just did it.
merrily
(45,251 posts)karynnj
(59,503 posts)He temporarily expanded the FOIA department by "cannibalizing" FOIA trained lawyers from other parts of the State Depart to deal with HRC's 55,000 emails. He also asked the IG to investigate both what happened and how they should archive email going forward.
What is clear is that the FOIA department in the State Department never before had to deal with processing all the email of a past Secretary of State. Not to mention, that even before he started, the State Department was slow processing even narrower media FOIA requests. It may be that part of this is the nature of State Department work requires more careful processing than say HUD. It also might have meant that even when he arrived, the department was too small.
Then came the HRC email problem - and HRC cavalierly asking the State Department to make it all public online. (Not to mention, even if she had not done that, many in the media likely would have requested all of it.) This was an enormous, very sensitive request. Kerry did three things - he asked the IG to investigate, he approved expanding the department, and he put someone in charge of it who had been a career staff person, not a political appointment. The FOIA department was 12 people and they expanded to (I think) near 50 - pulling FOIA trained lawyers from other parts of the State Department. From many accounts, those people worked long hours and weekends to do all that was needed.
I think it might have been more strategic not to give a 75 year estimate, but rather to point out that if it took a year to process 55,000 pages - processing 450,000 people - even if they could continue to use everyone pulled from other jobs - could take longer than the the potential 8 years a Hillary Clinton Presidency. Not to mention, realistically how many of the people in that group would stay in that job if they saw that - rather than being an exception - they would have to continue working under that pressure for years.
It is unfortunate that Kerry has had to deal with cleaning up this mess, but few will blame him for creating it or making it worse. The blame will be split -- with Democrats blaming the right for outrageous fishing expeditions asking for mountains of sensitive State Department information -- and Republicans mostly blaming Clinton.
Angel Martin
(942 posts)they are slow walking this deliberately, doing everything by first printing it on paper so nothing can be done electronically.
It's no different from when Clinton first turned over all the "relevant" emails from her server by printing them out, so they could not be searched electronically.
karynnj
(59,503 posts)As they are asked for ALL emails, what exactly do you want to sort. They need to examine each email, redact anything that the State Department needs to redact and to look at whether any info came from other departments. if so, send it to that department to determine if more needs redaction. (I have never worked on anything like this nor am I a lawyer. This is just from the descriptions of process for the Clinton emails.)
YOU may disagree, but the people charged with doing the job need to follow the rules. You might be willing to ignore the down side of having a less careful process - the release of names or information that should not be made public. What seems clear is that this is a very very tedious and difficult job.
Where having the emails searchable helps is if the requests are LIMITED. The RNC request seems to be for all email from these aides - and it involves 450,000 pages of email in total.
Angel Martin
(942 posts)working with them electronically is just a delaying tactic, which you would easily be able to recognize if a Repub Admin was doing this
this sort of selective "blindness" doesn't impress anyone
karynnj
(59,503 posts)Maybe you should apply for a job working on FOIA requests. From the descriptions of the process - in various governmental entities, it is not that simple.
Not to mention, it is YOU repeating the Republican charge that this is delaying. In fact, if the RNC was serious, they would have limited the scope of the request to something less than EVERYTHING to and from these people.
Angel Martin
(942 posts)on many FOIA requests.
I even did a time to comply estimate for a giant request which would have required printing ~8 million records from microfilm and then data capturing them and doing some tabulations.
Blanket requests for all emails by an individual (eg Cheryl Mills or Huma Abelin) are done when the requester does not trust that a limited request will be honestly complied with - which in this case is completely understandable.
We were also instructed to deliver FOIA responses by printing huge reams of documents unless an electronic response was specifically requested
merrily
(45,251 posts)karynnj
(59,503 posts)I also doubt that Secretary Kerry himself had anything to do with that estimate -- especially as it has been clear that he has distanced himself from the career professionals running that office. Yes, I know he heads the department, but I doubt that the FOIA department could handle the extreme number and breath of these requests with the people they had - even after they pulled people from other parts of the State Department to work on this.
Suffice it to say that even from the moment requested, while the FOIA group was struggling to get out the Clinton emails, it would have been impossible to get the emails out before the November election. Note that they also had many many other FOIA requests to honor on email from OTHER Clinton aides.
I do think they need to explain better how out of the ordinary what they have already done is.
merrily
(45,251 posts)believe many will.
Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)FOIA requests.
It would be a win/win.
SheilaT
(23,156 posts)In the Army Archives, to be specific. I was a sort of student intern. My history teacher at Northern Virginia Community College had told us about these positions. I applied and was hired.
It was an interesting experience on many levels. First off, it became clear to me very quickly that an important aspect of this position was to adjust the student-interns to such things as going to work on a regular basis. Showing up on time. Stuff like that. I was already over 30, and was far beyond this stuff.
I did several projects in the six months or so I was there. One was the Machine Readable Project. At the time the federal government was in the process of becoming computerized, and this project was intended to establish protocols for saving computer (machine readable) records in a way that more or less matched the standards for paper records. To do this, a survey had been sent out to every army installation around the world asking them what they were doing at that point to preserve these records. I was tasked with collating and turning into another machine readable format (i.e. IBM punchcards) what they'd sent back to us. The woman who instructed me in what to do with these surveys spent over an hour giving me ten minutes' worth of information. She made it clear she thought this would take two weeks or so. I was done in less than two hours. It wasn't hard. But I was in an office where people were painfully under-employed. The particular woman who'd spent so long telling me about this task spent about six hours every day just staring at the wall. She honestly had at best two hours of work every day. At the time I thought she was incompetent, or an idiot, but I've come to understand that it wasn't her fault she had almost nothing to occupy her time.
A bit later, I was assigned the Agent Orange Project. I was to go through a very long list of documents, and fill out order cards calling up those which seemed to have any connection to the Agent Orange stuff in Vietnam. Already Vietnam Vets were claiming that they had illnesses and deformed children because of exposure to the defoliant. I only had the titles of the reports to go by, and I was told that I should err on the side of generosity: anything that looked remotely connected, I should order. The first day I must have filled out fifty orders, and the next day probably a hundred more. The day after that my boss got an angry phone call from the records center saying they couldn't possibly fill those order so quickly. I was restricted to 25 orders per week.
The third project I worked on was a filing project. Keep in mind I was working for the Army Archives, the people who set the rules about what should and should not be retained at U.S. Army installations around the world. They kept huge three ring binders of their rules. The rules were updated periodically. You'd think this was the one place in the entire United States Government and the United States Army that would have these rules completely up to date, wouldn't you? I was assigned to file the updates that no one had gotten to recently. I want to add here that I had been an airline ticket agent for ten years, immediately prior to this job. One of the delightful things I got to do was to update the Rules Tariff, these VERY LARGE binders that had all of the rules and regulations relating to airlines. Things like the routes we flew, the stuff about the clubs at the airports, what we had to do if a flight was cancelled or delayed. Stuff like that. We got updates more or less on a weekly basis. It was a steady part time job to make sure the Rules Tariff was up to date.
So back to my government job. I might want to point out that I was a GS-2, the absolutely lowest of the low. I think there may have been, back before President Lincoln, jobs that were categorized as GS-1, but no longer. In the office I worked in, the next lowest employee was a GS-7. Many of them were GS-9. My own boss was a GS-11, and his boss was a GS-13. The gulf between us was huge. Sort of like an enlisted man just out of basic training, compared to a Colonel or General. Trust me, I don't exaggerate here.
Back to the job. I was often bored, and as you can already see I was vastly more efficient than they were used to. I'd actually gotten in the habit of shuffling between two offices until I figured no one really knew where I was, and I'd go home an hour or so early, because I had nothing to do. It's possible that Dr. Hatcher, my boss, was somewhat on to me, but since I was doing about three or four times the work they expected, he let it slide. In fact, I was told by more than one person that if I'd been a real employee rather than the student intern I was, I'd have been promoted out of there so fast I'd probably not have known what was happening. So I was asked to update the manuals. This was 1980. The last time the manuals had been updated had been 1967. I had TWELVE YEARS of unfiled updates to deal with. TWELVE YEARS!!. The up side was that I was kept occupied for about two, maybe three weeks. At the end, when I had everything caught up, I went into the office of the head honcho, the GS-13, and very tremulously told him that while I didn't mind doing the work, I was horrified that the revisions hadn't been filed for so long. He pressed me as to what I thought should be done, and I finally told him the task should be assigned to someone. And that he, or someone else, needed to monitor this and make sure the revisions were filed. I have no idea if this was done. I suppose, were I to go back there, I'd find unfiled revisions dating back to 1980.
The entire point of this rather lengthy post is that the government is capable of much obstruction, much delay. There simply is not the sense of urgency that exists in the outside world, the notion that getting something done in a timely manner is important. Similarly, the legal profession operates in its own time sense which has almost no connection to the world most of us live in. I've been a paralegal. I know.
The State Department could hire more people. Maybe those who already work there could actually work more than two hours a day. If you turned this over to a mid level law firm they'd be done in a year. To someone like me? Six months.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)christx30
(6,241 posts)come up with things like the $500 toilet seat. The $300 hammer. So they have the money they need to do their jobs, without the American people and congress not really knowing where all of that taxpayer money goes.
SheilaT
(23,156 posts)are desperately overworked. I realize I worked there a very long time ago, but even in other white collar office jobs I've held since, I'm quite astonished at how much time is spent socializing, or in many ways nonproductive. Chatting, cruising the internet, going over to see what's happening elsewhere, and so on.
Yes, a budget increase would be needed to hire new people, but meanwhile those already working are probably not quite working to their full capacity.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)zalinda
(5,621 posts)One person could go through more than 500 pages a month. The vast majority of those emails is probably junk stuff. You don't produce 450,000 emails in a few years talking 'secrets'. You go through the emails once and put aside all the stuff that doesn't need to be investigated, like social stuff and spam. Does the government not know how to sort and put stuff in piles? A good secretary could have all those emails sorted in no time.
The State Department is stalling.
Z
karynnj
(59,503 posts)Obama's Presidency.
I have read many posts that argue that the time suggested is far too long. However, we know that it took nearly a year to process Hillary Clinton's 55,000 pages. We also know that the State Department temporarily "cannibalized" FOIA trained people from every part of the State Department to expand what was about 12 people with a goal to getting 50 people to deal with the Clinton email alone. This also happens as the State Department has worked to change procedures to insure that email is properly archived going forward.
I think the problem is that this RNC demand is one of many - and it demands ALL email from three people. I may be wrong, but any FOIA requests from the past were on limited subject matter -- not a demand for ALL the email from high level officials. Just on DU today, there is at least one similar request for the emails of another person who worked for HRC. This with a backdrop of many many media requests.
I think that it would be a great idea for the State Department to demand an increase in budget to permanently expand their FOIA section and ask the House and Senate to approve it.