A government watchdog’s efforts to obtain documents related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s secret email server won’t be complete until October 2020.
The nonprofit organization Judicial Watch was told this week by an attorney for the Justice Department attorney that roughly 100,000 unreleased emails sought through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit are still being processed.
Attorney Jennie Kneedler’s reasoning while standing Tuesday before District Court Judge James E. Boasberg boiled down to three words: “Processing takes time.”
“From today’s hearing before Judge Boasberg, things remain status quo, processing an amount of 2,350 pages per month,” Judicial Watch attorney Lauren Burke told The Daily Caller on Wednesday. “It will be a couple of years before we conclude this.”
Ms. Burke said she suspects the process is being “slow-walked” on purpose by federal bureaucrats.
“Those who are in place at Justice or State or at other agencies dealing with these ongoing cases are the same people,” the attorney said. “Whether it’s higher-ups that aren’t putting their feet to the fire, it’s business as usual and everything gets slow walked. … nothing has fundamentally changed.”
Judge Boasberg was told that personnel typically process 2,350 emails related to the former secretary of state per month.
Former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch officially closed an FBI investigation into Ms. Clinton’s handling of government documents on July 7, 2016. FBI Director James Comey briefly revisited the case 11 days before the U.S. presidential election when an investigation into Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, turned up thousands of new documents.
“Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July,” Mr. Comey wrote to Congress on Nov. 6, 2016.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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