A Miracle! State Dept. Discovers 81,000 Emails They Insisted Didn’t Exist


The Daily Caller reports that in Sept. 2012, an FOIA request went out. The State Department responded in July 2013, saying that it found no responsive records. Amazing!

Gawker followed up with an appeal saying it is “difficult to believe” that Clinton aide Phillip Reines sent no emails on his state.gov account given that some of his emails had already been published at the time. Then the response changed because it filed a lawsuit in light of the revelation that Clinton used a personal email account and maintained a private server during her stint at State.

In the legal filing, the State Department said that it has found “approximately 5.5 gigabytes of data containing 81,159 emails of varying length” from Reines’ account.

Of those, “22% of the 81,159 emails may be responsive” to Gawker’s specific request, the State Department stated.

“Therefore, the Department believes that it will need to conduct a line- by-line review of an estimated 17,855 emails for applicable FOIA exemptions. Moreover, some of the responsive records may need to be referred to other agencies for consultation or processing.”

Read it all here.

State’s discrepancy in providing information requested raises important questions about how the agency handles and responds to FOIA requests. But, lawsuits manage to bring leverage.

 

 

 



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