The report also states “OIG found no evidence that the Secretary requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server”.
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Hillary Clinton defended her email practices as secretary of state on Thursday, saying the rules that governed its use were hardly a “model of clarity”.
In the 2010 exchange, top personal aide Huma Abedin suggested that it was time to look into getting an official state.gov email address because Mrs. Clinton’s messages from her clintonemail.com account were landing in staffers’ spam folders. Clinton declined the suggestion, saying that she did not “want any risk of the personal being accessible”.
But the findings on Clinton are sure to reverberate through the 2016 presidential campaign, as her spokesman, Brian Fallon, noted in a statement. “If I could go back, I’d do it differently”. As one spokesman said, the facts hadn’t changed, so there was no need for Clinton to avail herself to questions from her traveling press corps.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is examining whether classified information was illegally transmitted in the private e-mails, and Republicans continue to use the issue in the presidential campaign.
All three emails cited in the inspector general’s report appear to contain work-related passages, raising questions about why they were not turned over to the State Department past year. The report, released Wednesday, instead indicates she could indeed be vulnerable to legal consequences. The next day, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations emailed the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Planning and instructed them not to email the Secretary “anything sensitive” and stated that she could “explain more in person”, the report said. It’s another thing entirely when the evidence is so overwhelming – and coming from, of all places, the inspector general of the very State Department she once ran – that even the Beltway media and the icons of the political class feel they can no longer pretend not to notice. According to recent polls, the majority of voters believe Clinton is dishonest.
And according to the OIG report, those staff members responsible for granting such approval “did not – and would not – approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business”.
Use of the private server made it impossible for the department to comply with Freedom of Information requests without her personal cooperation.
I thought it was allowed.
What does it say about Hillary Clinton that she was so determined to shield herself from public disclosure laws that she was willing to break every rule in the book, and then with a straight face tell the public that she did nothing wrong? The report also says that Clinton should have handed over her official emails after leaving.
In an aside, the inspector general highlighted a related issue: that threats to and attacks on the State Department’s computers have been growing.
But this is the Clintons, and thus we may never know the answer to the most fascinating question: What was she trying to hide? If she was willing to risk national security once, what’s stopping her from doing it again?
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Sanders has a steep – if not impossible – climb to make in order to catch up with Clinton the race for the Democratic nomination. The one with the most teeth, the one most likely to bite Hillary Clinton most painfully, is the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is expected to be concluded well before November.
