The State Department Explains E-Mail

With the Hillary Clinton e-mail indiscretion dominating the newscasts, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell recently interviewed State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki about e-mail at State. Leaving it to you to draw conclusions about our government and who they choose to represent it:

Mitchell: A million emails were sent but only 61,000 in 2011 were archived and two years later only 41,000.

Psaki: Smart [a system] is one of many tools, it's only one tool, used to archve and keep records of our State Department records. Employees can print their records. There are a range of tools that they can use. This is a tool that is traditionally used by overseas posts, but we've also taken a number of steps to upgrade what we do here. Now and today Secretary Kerry's emails are automatically archived, dozens of senior State Department employees' emails are automatically archived, so this is an evolving process, one that we are continuing to strive to do better on and hopefully over the coming months and years we will have a better electronic system in place.

Mitchell: The 2009 upgrade and the foreign policy the manual indicated that people should no longer be printing and filing, they should be computerizing these records. Do you automatically archive your records?

Psaki: The fact is it's about what the technology allows for, and right now there are processes that are underway in the State Department to make it more user friendly, make it possible for all employees to take steps to more easily archive their records but it's been a process that has been ongoing and clearly the use of email, how this has been such a prevalent part of what we do in the federal government, has changed over the course of time and clearly we need to do more to keep up with that changing component.

Mitchell: Part of Hillary Clinton's rationale for not immediately turning over her emails and for using a private system is that any email she sent to a State Department colleague would be automatically kept, but according to this IG report, that wasn't the case.

Psaki: Well, there are many ways of keeping emails and having access to emails so I think his report was referring to one specific program that is a tool that some state dept employees use but many employees use different means of keeping track of and archiving their records, and again this is something that isn't perfect. There are obviously steps that we need to take and are taking and we have taken over the past months and years to upgrade our capabilities here.

In her torrent of nonsense Ms Psaki speaks of "over the past months and years" and "over the coming months and years".

Are we mistaken? Is she talking about the e-mail that the rest of the world mastered long ago or has State embarked on another Manhattan Project?