The State Department will release these Clinton emails after everyone who sent them is dead

Hillary Clinton
(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

It will take about 75 years to fully compile and release the emails sent by Hillary Clinton and three of her top aides during her tenure in the Obama administration, the State Department said this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filing requesting the records.

"Given the Department's current FOIA workload and the complexity of these documents, it can process about 500 pages a month," the agency calculated, bringing the final deadline to somewhere around 2091. Following the predictable uproar over such a lengthy timeline, which would be completed years after the death of everyone involved, State spokesman Mark Toner defended the estimate Tuesday by arguing that it is not "outlandish" because of the "enormous amount of FOIA requests" that are "very complex."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.