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State Department details Clinton email release foul-up

The State Department failed to circulate more than 7,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails for interagency review because its personnel were distracted by other aspects of the email-release project and simply lost track of what messages had been sent to other agencies for comment, a State Department official said in a report to a federal judge Friday night.

State Department Information Programs & Services official Eric Stein said State personnel were so focused on court-ordered goals for monthly releases of the 54,000 pages of Clinton emails that they did not notice that some documents marked for interagency review were never sent for such a review until the problem was discovered early last month.

"Looking back, the team should have identified in November 2015 several thousand more pages as still needing at least some interagency consultation," Stein wrote in a declaration filed with U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras. "However, it was not until Monday, January 11, that the Clinton email team, while taking stock of what remained to be done before the final scheduled production, realized that it could not account for responses from some agencies for certain documents. The block owners made inquiries with agencies about specific documents. It was not until agencies started to respond to those inquiries that it was definitively known that most of the documents that remained to be produced had not ever been referred out to those agencies. The team began to look into the matter further and found similar problems elsewhere in the collection."

Stein said State has no completely automated system to track interagency referrals. Aside from an entry in the main document-processing database that a message needed interagency coordination, the other system State relied upon was a spreadsheet listing referrals and their status. That turned out to be faulty. He also said the dual goals of meeting the monthly deadlines and preventing the release of uncleared messages caused the team to lose sight of less-pressing issues like whether all the emails had been properly farmed out to to other agencies.

"The tracking system was set up to detect problems that could result in the release of documents that had not been fully vetted among agencies and meeting the upcoming monthly goal, not longer-term problems such as the one that arose," he wrote.

Stein, a senior adviser and deputy to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Global Information Services, said the Clinton email release process has been "hectic" and he described his colleagues as under "pressure" to meet the monthly goals.

"This has been a tremendous, unprecedented undertaking by a team that has worked to the point of exhaustion," Stein wrote. "I regret that this

error occurred and was not detected and corrected earlier."

Acting on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold, Contreras ordered State to carry out monthly releases of Clinton's emails beginning in June of last year, with the process completed by Jan. 29. However, a week before that final deadline, State reported the snafu regarding interagency review and asked for an additional month to complete the process.

The judge complained at a hearing earlier this week that State's failure had put him "between a rock and hard place."

In an order issued Thursday, the judge told State to make rolling releases of the remaining Clinton emails starting Saturday and on Feb. 19 and 26, with the final release on Feb. 29. The schedule will result in batches of Clinton's emails emerging in the days before the upcoming South Carolina primary and Nevada caucus where Clinton is competing for the Democratic presidential nomination.