Washington (CNN)An independent watchdog responsible for overseeing the State Department issued a new report Thursday that says there are significant problems in how the department handles requests for information from the public, and that some information held on private servers or in private accounts are being missed. Apparently, the original document consisted of “talking points”, essentially a script for a meeting with a foreign official. And as the State Department has previously released, that 328 brings the total of Clinton’s private server emails categorized as classified to 999, Fox News said.
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The “nonpaper” Clinton refers to is a term commonly used in diplomatic and global organization circles, indicating a document that does not reflect the offiicial position of the entity that produced it. Nonpapers are often circulated within worldwide bodies as tools for discussion.
The State Department would not comment on whether Clinton had ordered her staff to send classified information over a nonsecure channel.
Clinton has faced questions during her campaign about whether her unusual email setup was sufficient to ensure the security of government information and retention of records. In response to Clinton’s request for a set of since-redacted talking points, Sullivan writes, “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax”.
On its face, the former Secretary of State appears to be directing her staff to take material that they plainly believed ought to be sent via a secure method, and send it via a method that might make it susceptible to interception by unintended recipients.
The actual report said, “Under current law and department policy, employees who use personal email to conduct official business are required to forward or copy email from a personal account to their respective department accounts within 20 days”. Was her instruction actually carried out?
The FBI is already investigating Clinton’s off-the-books email setup, but Arends hopes that Lynch will open another inquiry into Clinton’s email to Sullivan.
Friday’s e-mail batch was released a week after the department failed to meet a court-ordered target to publish 82-percent of e-mails by the end of 2015.
Foggy Bottom offered no explanation as to why the release was delayed from Thursday evening, as originally scheduled, to the dead of night on Friday. In a briefing with reporters, he attributed December’s delay to a “variety of reasons”, including the holidays. All but one of those documents contained material later determined to be “confidential” level, and one was labeled “secret”.
The State Department choose to release 2,900 pages of Clinton’s emails on the same day the report was released, The Hill reports.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the email “disturbing” and said it raised “a host of serious questions” about whether classified information was sent through her private email server.
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The report blamed numerous lapses on declining personnel at a time of rising demands but said the department had responded positively to all recommendations.
