Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her senior aides did not comply with the State Department’s record-keeping policies, an internal watchdog determined in a report sent to Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
Through the exclusive use of her personal email account routed through a private server, Clinton circumvented policies designed to follow federal records laws and may have jeopardized official secrets, the department’s Office of the Inspector General said in a report obtained by The Hill ahead of the its official publication on Thursday.Clinton never requested permission to use the personal server, which was located at her New York home, and it “would not” have been approved, in part, because of “the security risks in doing so,” the watchdog agency determined.
Additionally, Clinton “never demonstrated” to State Department security officials that her personal server or BlackBerry device “met minimum information security requirements.”
Moreover, Clinton’s decision not to use an official email ending instate.gov “is not an appropriate method” of preserving emails under the Federal Records Act, the inspector general said in the hotly anticipated 83-page report.
“Therefore, Secretary Clinton should have preserved any federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” it said. “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."
The conclusion is a damning one for Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential front-runner and likely nominee, who has faced persistent criticism on multiple fronts for her use of a private server.
A spokesman with the watchdog office declined to comment on the report ahead of its Thursday publication.
The report’s criticism extends beyond Clinton, and blames “longstanding, systemic weaknesses” for preserving federal records at the State Department “that go well beyond the tenure of any one secretary of State.” Dozens of State Department officials were found to have used personal email accounts for official business.
Former Secretary Colin Powell was also faulted for not handing over emails when he left office.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner noted in a statement that the department has taken action on all eight of the recommendations made by the inspector general’s office. The problems, he indicated, were a symptom of getting the slow-moving bureaucracy of the government up to date with new technology.
“It is clear that the department could have done a better job preserving emails and records of secretaries of State and their senior staff going back several administrations,” Toner said.
“The department is committed to completing these improvements and these matters have the full attention of Secretary [John] Kerry and the department’s senior staff,” he added.
Still, Clinton’s bespoke communications setup has dogged her throughout the presidential campaign, and criticism is only likely to intensify once she enters a full-throated general election matchup against
Donald Trump.
And unlike previous secretaries of State, the department’s recordkeeping policies were more evolved by the time Clinton took office, the report maintained.
In addition to the State Department inspector general, a watchdog for the nation’s intelligence agencies and the FBI are also conducting separate analyses related to Clinton’s server and the possibility that government secrets were mishandled or that federal recordkeeping laws were thwarted.
The State Department is also battling a multiple open records lawsuits alleging that Clinton’s use of a personal server foiled federal procedures. Multiple current and former Clinton aides are scheduled to provide depositions in two of those lawsuits, and Clinton herself may be forced to answer questions under oath.
In late 2014, Clinton gave to the State Department roughly 30,000 emails from her personal machine. Another similarly sized batch of emails, which she said were purely personal, were deleted, she has claimed.
Critics of Clinton have questioned that move, and the head of the main litigant in the open records lawsuits has said he hopes to obtain all the deleted emails.
The stack of approximately 55,000 pages of emails Clinton gave to the federal government “was incomplete,” the inspector general noted in its Wednesday report, pointing to multiple instances in which it found through other means emails not contained in the State Department’s files.
Only five of the 26 current and former Clinton aides responded to questionnaires sent by the watchdog office.
In addition to Clinton herself, four close staffers conducted “extensive use of personal email accounts,” the inspector general claimed, adding up to nearly 72,000 pages worth of messages. In doing so, they also violated the State Department’s record-keeping policies.
Clinton’s campaign did not immediately offer a comment about the inspector general report on Wednesday.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-s...records-policy