The Republican National Committee demanded that the State Department release emails sent from top aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before the November election, accusing the agency of using "stall tactics" to delay the release.
In a court motion filed Monday evening, the RNC hit the agency’s "tortoise-like" ability to fulfill public records requests, two weeks after the Obama administration said it would take 75 years to turn over the emails.
"We do not live in the era of quill pens or stagecoaches; just like private parties, the Government has access to sophisticated electronic search tools that make it possible to search large document sets with relative ease," the RNC said in its filing.
The State Department said earlier this month that the RNC’s Freedom of Information Act request amounted to hundreds of thousands of emails and was "too burdensome" to complete. The agency claimed it could only process about 500 pages of emails per month.
The RNC called the estimate "uniquely (indeed, historically) slow," the Hill reported Tuesday.
"According to the agency, it must move at that snail’s pace regardless of whether the responsive emails reveal classified material or contain only a one-line lunch order or YouTube forward," the filing read.
The committee sued the State Department in March after the agency failed to respond to an initial public records requests submitted last year.
Clinton’s private email server is under investigation by the FBI. Investigators are looking into whether classified information was criminally mishandled on Clinton’s server.
The RNC said the investigations raise concerns that Clinton knowingly violated federal law. The filing emphasized voters’ right to know the "uncensored truth" about Clinton’s tenure at the State Department ahead of the general election.