Several news sites sent reporters to the courtroom of Judge Boasberg today to get an update on the status of those 14,900 deleted Clinton emails the FBI recovered.
CNN has a useful graphic, showing that 9,500 of the emails were personal. Of the remaining 5,600 emails, State will process 1,050 pages of emails by election day. If the email is a duplicate, or meets one of the 9 exemptions, it won't be released. In court, the lawyer for State noted that a substantial number of the emails were duplicates or near-duplicates to those already released.
The Judge in this case, unlike some of the others, realizes how burdened State is with the FOIA requests.
Saying he was sympathetic to the efforts of the State Department's heavily-taxed FOIA division, Boasberg offered his 1,500-page order.
"I think it's important the public have as much clarity as possible," Boasberg said, but later quipped, "sometimes I wonder if there's anything other that FOIA processing going on at State."
We wonder that, ourselves. It's not that all of Judicial Watch's 3000+ FOIA requests and 100+ FOIA lawsuits are going to State, but the majority are.
Politico provides further commentary from Judge Boasberg:
"I think we all need to bear in mind the State Department has other duties beyond FOIA requests," said Boasberg, who was appointed by President Barack Obama. "I know the State Department has been working very hard.....The court can’t jump to the head of the queue."
Politico also quotes another Justice lawyer who estimated that half the emails are likely duplicates of ones already processed. And many of the emails that weren't exempt outright for being personal could be found to so under closer scrutiny.
Bottom line: we're not going to see many of the recovered emails because they'll be duplicates or personal. Frankly, I suspect those we do see are unlikely to be exciting or interesting.
Not to say our friends at Judicial Watch and the House Republicans won't try to make something out of nothing. After all, look at the silliness surrounding the Reddit posts I wrote about previously.
Then there's today's controversy about Cheryl Mills and another Clinton assistant being given limited immunity when the FBI examined her computer. According to a second Politico story:
A lawyer for Mills and Samuelson, Beth Wilkinson, said she requested the immunity grants because of inter-agency disputes about whether some information in Clinton's emails was classified.
"As the government indicated in these letters, the DOJ and FBI considered my clients to be witnesses and nothing more. Indeed, the Justice Department assured us that they believed my clients did nothing wrong. At all points my clients cooperated with the government’s investigation, including voluntarily participating in interviews with the FBI and DOJ," Wilkinson said in a statement.
"The letters released to the Hill today only covered the computers that my clients had used in performing their legal work," Wilkinsion added. "Because of the confusion surrounding the various agencies’ positions on the after-the-fact classification decisions, I advised my clients to accept this letter from DOJ."
Representative Chaffetz is having an oddly timed hissy fit about the immunity, considering he's known about it for some time. You'd think there was an important debate coming up, or something.
However, Chaffetz isn't the only one indulging in hyperbole to the Press while managing not to do much in the way of actual work. Representative Lamar Smith is also getting into the act, demanding details of the Clinton server security, evidently unaware that the released FBI report contains these details.
But then, Representative Smith has never shown himself to be all that scientifically adept.
These are all desperate people. As they say in the midwest, this is their circus and Trump is their monkey.
