State Department Clinton email request will take decades to fill

The U.S. State Department claims it will take “generations” to process the Republican National Committee’s request for copies of Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time as secretary of state. In March, the RNC sued the State Department to get the agency to release emails from Clinton’s top former aides. Last week, a federal judge ordered the emails to be released, but the State Department responded with a court filing claiming it would take 75 years to completely fulfill the request. In Tuesday’s briefing, State Department spokesman Mark Toner defended that estimate: “It’s a very broad range, involving a number of people, over a period of, I think, four years. And it’s not an outlandish estimation, believe it or not.” The State Department claims the delay is due to a current backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests and the complexity of retrieving the documents. The department says it can only process about 500 pages a month, and at that rate, the request would take generations to fulfill.