SNAILS GUFFAW AS STATE DEPARTMENT CLAIMS IT NEEDS 18 MONTHS TO DO A TWO-PAGE LIST: It’s not just any list, to be sure. It’s a list of the estimated 60 State Department employees granted the same Special Government Employee status as was enjoyed by Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. The SGE designation allows the designee to draw paychecks from other sources outside the government.

In Abedin’s case, besides her government paycheck, she was also on Clinton’s personal payroll, the Clinton Foundation payroll and the Teneo payroll. The latter is an international consulting firm with deep ties to the Clintons personally and the Clinton Foundation. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock asked for the list of all State Department SGEs in a Freedom of Information Act request in July 2015.

“The estimated completion date (ECD) for this case is: December 2016,” the department told TheDCNF earlier this week. They defended the delay, saying “given the high volume of FOIA requests, in addition to a backlog which the department is working diligently to reduce, there is presently a delay in the completion of FOIA requests.”

Given the growing evidence that Clinton used the department as a conduit for generating and channeling money – much of it from foreign sources – to the foundation, two questions must be asked: Was Abedin’s SGE status somehow related to such efforts, and were other Clinton aides also designated SGEs and for what purposes? The answers to either of those questions may explain why the State Department is loathe to cough up that two-page list. They may also shed light on why the FBI has a second investigation separate from the probe of Hillary’s email and focused specifically on the foundation.