DOJ & FBI should be held to the "U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood" standard

Remember the documents seized by the government from Michael Cohen (one of Trump's attorney's) that may have been subject to Attorney-Client privilege?

A month ago, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood appointed a Special Master to supervise the review of the seized documents. Since then Cohen’s lawyer, Todd Harrison says:

they’ve gone through about a third of the 3.7 million files received from the government.

But a million documents a month is not fast enough for U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood who, according to Bloomberg:

on Wednesday gave Cohen’s attorneys until June 15 to complete a review of more than 3 million documents and electronic files to weed out privileged ones that shouldn’t be seen by the government. Otherwise, Wood said, she’ll allow Justice Department attorneys to finish the job.

Now I do not know if 2 weeks to review another 2 million documents is reasonable or not. But I do know it is very different from the standard the government sets for itself.

Consider the Congressional oversight committees waiting 6 months for 1.2 million documents that still have not been turned over. Even a subpoena did not make a difference to the DOJ. To date only a few thousand documents out of the 1.2 million have been turned over because the DOJ says it needs to review them first:

As part of the joint investigation, Chairmen Goodlatte and Gowdy have repeatedly requested that the Justice Department hand over the 1.2 million documents relating to the investigation into former Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server to send and receive classified information. To date, the Committees have received only a few thousand of the 1.2 million documents provided to the Inspector General.

Or what about how the DOJ and the Freedom of Information Act requests where the DOJ is required to turn documents over to the public. Here is just one example from Judicial Watch where they say the fastest they can process documents is 500 documents a month:

In November 2016, the State Department was ordered to produce no less than 500 pages of records a month to Judicial Watch, emails of which the FBI found in its investigation into Clinton’s non-government email system. The State Department has produced 23 batches of documents so far. At the current pace, the Clinton emails and other records won’t be fully available for possible release until at least 2020.

So a million documents a month is not fast enough from a private citizen who has to pay lawyers to review all the documents, but 500 documents a month is fine for the DOJ which has the seemingly unlimited resources of the Federal Government at its disposal.

If confidence is ever to be restored in the DOJ and FBI again, if people are to ever trust them again, then they need to be held to the same standards as the courts hold private citizens to.