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FOIA requests have surged since Hillary Clinton disclosed she used a private email server. | Getty Amid Clinton email mess, State Department FOIA backlog surges

The State Department's backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests has surged to an all-time high in the wake of the disclosure of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, according to newly disclosed figures.

About 29,000 FOIA requests are currently pending at State, up from a little under 22,000 last September, State FOIA official Eric Stein said in a court filing this week.

The number of FOIA lawsuits against State also continues to climb, and stood at 106 as of Monday, Stein said. That's up from 73 a little over a year ago — a time when State was already complaining that it was struggling under "a crushing workload."

State provided the numbers to U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg on Monday as the diplomatic agency resisted a bid by the Republican National Committee to speed up the disclosure of emails that 14 top State Department officials during Clinton's tenure sent to or received from accounts at a dozen web domains associated with the former secretary, former President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

State has identified about 7,000 pages of records as potentially responsive to the request and has agreed to process those at a rate of at least 500 pages a month. "Any additional commitment cannot honestly be made at this time," Stein told the judge.

The RNC has called that proposal "unreasonably slow" and has noted that it would drag disclosure of the records out well past the November election where Hillary Clinton is expected to be the Democratic nominee for president.

However, Justice Department attorney Jean-Michel Voltaire said such claims are common now in State's FOIA caseload.

"The RNC claims that it needs the requested records before the election. But that goes for many other requesters and many other requests, many of which were submitted before the RNC’s," Voltaire said. "There are currently 85 other production deadlines the Department must meet prior to November 2016."

It's unclear how many of the 29,000 pending FOIA requests relate to Clinton's emails. The processing of the emails Clinton returned to State was completed earlier this year, but some lawsuits for that material remain in litigation over questions about State's obligations to search for emails Clinton did not turn over.

Tracking the Clinton email litigation sprawl is difficult because the requests and suits have now moved beyond Clinton to focus on the messages of her top aides.

Stein said State has about 71 full-time or part-time former foreign service officers who serve as document reviewers. A total of 15 of them are assigned to handle litigation cases, with the remainder assigned to the vast majority of FOIA requests not in litigation, he said.

However, due to deadlines in 27 other cases, many of the non-litigation reviewers are being pulled into the litigation work.

The cascading delays cause a kind of Catch-22, Stein suggested.

"Reassigning so many individuals to work on FOIA requests in litigation lengthens the time needed to respond to requests that are not in litigation and in turn may lead to additional FOIA litigation cases being brought against the Department," he wrote.

Whatever the reason, there are indications that State's FOIA personnel have been losing ground. The agency's annual FOIA report for Fiscal Year 2015 showed a sharp drop in the number of requests processed. While State closed out more than 18,000 requests in Fiscal 2014, it processed fewer than 14,000 in 2015.

In another lawsuit brought by the RNC and pending before another judge, the State Department is seeking to shut down altogether a request for hundreds of thousands of emails sent or received by Clinton aides. The agency has argued it would take "generations" to process the records in question, and perhaps as long as 75 years.