The State Department is beginning to sort through more than 55,000 pages of e-mails from Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary that she handed over late last year, sticking taxpayers with additional costs that could reach into the millions. It’s an additional burden for her former department and another aspect of an e-mail fiasco her political opponents plan to highlight. Clinton's office sent the e-mails to the State Department last December, a portion of the total in her possession, after printing them out and stacking them in boxes. The department largely sat on them until last week, when news broke that she had used a "homebrew" server rather than her government account to conduct her official business. Clinton tweeted last week that she wanted the State Department to release her e-mails, but she hasn't acknowledged what a huge job it will be for her former employees.
On March 5, Secretary of State John Kerry pledged that the department would work “as rapidly as possible” to go through all the new documents, redact any sensitive information, and then release them to the public. The department has since said that the effort will take several months.
Representative Mike Pompeo, a member of the House special committee on Benghazi that is subpoenaing Clinton’s personal e-mails, told us that based on his committee’s experience sorting through 44,000 other hard-copy paper documents provided by the State Department last year, the new effort could involve "hundreds and hundreds of man hours."
“I think the effort of reviewing these documents will greatly exceed a million bucks,” said Pompeo. “The United States taxpayer is going to pay for that.”
The State Department must have employees review every page to ensure that no sensitive or classified information will be released. Those redacted documents must then be scanned and compiled into a database searchable by the public.
If Clinton had used her departmental e-mail account -- as she insisted her employees do during her tenure -- the messages would already be in the government’s electronic records management system and could be redacted and released as part of the regular Freedom of Information Act process, Pompeo said.
“Remember, this challenge was created when a government employee decided not to use the government system,” he said. “This is another reason that the directive secretary Clinton gave to all State Department employees to use the official system actually did matter.”
Click for Full Text!
Poster Comment:
All of our good state secrets are leaked by the DoS. Now we know why.
