Things are getting very interesting at Foggy Bottom and Hillary Clinton holdovers as well as Trump saboteurs are ducking for cover.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s assignment of as many as several hundred State Department officials to quickly clear a huge backlog of public records requests is being met with deep skepticism by rank-and-file employees.
Tillerson says his goal is transparency. But many State workers fear the real reason is political: expediting the public release of thousands of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official emails.
The staffers also suspect the move — which will reassign many of them from far more substantive duties and has already sparked a union complaint — is meant to force many of them to resign out of frustration with what are essentially clerical positions.
The issue spotlights the deepening distrust toward Tillerson at Foggy Bottom, where his attempts to restructure the department, cut its budget and centralize policymaking have already hurt morale. But it is drawing applause from conservative groups, which have been pressuring Tillerson to act on a backlog of 13,000 Freedom of Information Act requests — many of them relating to emails and other records from Clinton’s tenure.
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