The attorney for Vice News tells government attny they object to delaying

January 22, 2016 | 1:40 pm
A government attorney will file a motion in federal court on behalf of the State Department Friday seeking an additional month to complete its release of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

State was supposed to publicly release the final batch of emails next week in response to VICE News' Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, filed in January 2015, which sought all of Clinton's emails. The State Department now expects to complete its production by February 29, after four Democratic primary contests. Those emails would contain important details of Clinton's work during the waning days of her tenure as the nation's top diplomat. The government attorney, Robert Prince, asked VICE News whether we would consent to the extension. Our attorney, Ryan James, told Prince we opposed it.

The attorney said in a court document filed in US District Court in Washington, DC Friday the extra time is needed to allow completion of the "interagency consultation process," which involves reviewers from intelligence agencies who scrutinize Clinton's emails for classified information. Prince noted that State will not meet its deadline because the department's FOIA office forgot to send thousands of emails to an interagency consultation team made up of intelligence community personnel to review for sensitive information. State discovered that "during the week of January 11, 2016… a number of pages of the Clinton emails that had been identified during the period June through October 2015 as requiring interagency consultation had not in fact been sent to all the agencies for which consultation was required."

"State overlooked some necessary consultations at a time when the Clinton email team's efforts were focused on processing records that had already gone through interagency consultation in order to meet the monthly interim goals…. Thus, this oversight was not detected until the push to meet the final deadline," Prince said in the court filing. "After discovering this oversight, State immediately began processing these documents, which State ultimately determined to number 7,254 pages, so that they could be sent to the appropriate agencies for review. The processing of the documents for sending is finished and delivery to some of the agencies has been completed. Delivery of the remaining documents has been interrupted by the storm and is anticipated to be completed next week."

He also said that a blizzard in Washington, DC, which shut down the federal government Friday, means the State Department can't send the emails to the interagency reviewers. Therefore, the State Department expects to fall short in meeting its court ordered production due at the end of the month.


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James, VICE News' FOIA attorney, said the State Department initially said last March it would take "several months" to release the Democratic presidential candidate's communications.

But then on May 26, 2015, "State asked the Court to give it until January 15, 2016," James said. "The Court gave State an extra two weeks, until January 31, 2016. I think it is fair to ask how many more extensions is State going to seek, and what's in the remaining emails that requires so much more time to review and release them?"

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https://news.vice.com/article/state-department-asks-for-even-more-time-to-finish-releasing-hillary-clinton-emails-1