The State Department ‘finds’ almost 18,000 Clinton adviser emails it claimed did not exist

 Back in 2012 Gawker filed a FOIA request seeking emails from one of Hillary Clinton’s advisers, Philippe Reines, and in 2013 the State Department informed Gawker that the emails the website was seeking did not exist.

  Here is more:

The website Gawker filed a FOIA request in 2012 seeking any emails between Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines (a top Hillary Clinton adviser) and a list of 33 major media outlets. Interest in Reines’ correspondence with the media was prompted by an angry email exchange between Reines and journalist Michael Hastings. In the exchange, Reines lost his temper and told Hastings to “f-ck off.”

In July of 2013, the State Department responded to Gawker’s request with a letter which stated, “After a thorough search…no records responsive to your request were located.” Earlier this year Gawker filed a lawsuit asking a judge to force State to produce documents which were responsive to its initial FOIA request.

  But that was then and this is now: with the aforementioned lawsuit ongoing the State Department responded to a court ordered status update guess what the agency found? Nearly 18,000 emails which are related to the Gawker FOIA request:

Finally, in a “court-ordered status report” the State Department has admitted to having located 81,159 emails belonging to Reines. Of those, State found 22 percent may be responsive to the FOIA request made back in 2012. “The Department believes that it will need to conduct a line-by-line review of an estimated 17,855 emails for applicable FOIA exemptions,” the status update reads.

The State Department now says it has so many documents that are responsive to the initial request that it will need to issue a group of them every 30 days until all 17,855 have been released. State adds that it is unable to even estimate how long the total production will take.

  Isn’t that convenient? Of course the State Department has had over two years to delete any emails it does not want to ever see the light of day so these are only the emails they are admitting exist, or possibly there were more emails which no longer exist. And if you think the State Department would never risk deleting emails you should ask yourself why Hillary Clinton was looking to borrow a book (coincidentally(?) from another State Department employee) on how to make deleted emails stay deleted…

Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium