We’re all familiar with the story of the Clinton emails and the claims they were all turned over previously.  However, once Clinton staffers were required to turn over their emails that story fell apart.  The State Department has been inundated with the staff’s emails and has been very slow to process them.

But a federal judge is having none of the State Department’s excuses:

A federal judge urged the State Department to get more people on the case reviewing and releasing the emails of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and her top aides, saying Tuesday that all sides should be eager to get the matter behind them.

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan also rejected the State Department’s timeline for searching the aides’ emails and insisted the government have them all put in an electronic system by the end of this week, and do an initial search to see which ones are related to the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks next week.

“There has to be some reallocation of resources because these are atypical cases,” the judge told Obama administration lawyers.

State Department lawyers claim that staffers are already stretched to the breaking point and are working as quickly as they can.  “The State Department is being crushed with obligations,” claimed Elizabeth Shapiro, a lawyer for the State Department.

Citizens United has sued to have access to some of the emails and claims the delay by the State Department is a “tactical” decision made to slow down the process.  The State Department has asked to have until December to satisfy the Citizen’s United file search.  However, Judge Sullivan has rejected that:

Instead he gave the department until the end of this week to have all of their emails put in a searchable database within the department, and gave them until next week to perform an initial search by keyword to determine the universe of documents that might be responsive to Citizens United’s request for information.

Nice to see someone finally putting the hammer down on this nonsense.  There is no reason to believe the request by Citizens United can’t be fulfilled in a much shorter time and Judge Sullivan has made that clear.

Stay tuned.

~McQ