Clinton admits she’s a bad campaigner, but she makes matters worse with decisions such as brushing off the 2010 urging to start using government email, not releasing some emails, refusing to talk to the inspector general for this report and refusing to release the text of her speeches to Wall Street. But the result wasn’t very convenient; because of State Department spam filters, Clinton’s emails weren’t getting through to her own department.
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CLINTON: “The system we used was set up for President Clinton’s office”. March 2015 press conference.
She was also supposed to have her Blackberry “configured in accordance with the Department’s security guidelines”. “I can’t think of anything comparable”, said Tom Fitton, president of the watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has filed more than a dozen lawsuits trying to pry loose emails from Mrs. Clinton and her aides.
The attack continued later that day, prompting another official to write to two of Clinton’s top aides, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan, to warn them not to send Clinton “anything sensitive”.
In a lengthy report, the IG said that “beginning in late 2005 and continuing through 2011”, the department had toughened its rules in its Foreign Affairs Manual, issuing “various memoranda specifically discussing the obligation to use department systems in most circumstances and identifying the risks of not doing so”.
Q: And so the standalone computer that you were proposing to allow her to check e-mail, was that for her to stay in touch with family and friends or for work purposes? The server was located at her house in New York State. But the State Department was unprepared for the cost of supporting such a device, and its IT department didn’t have the resources (nor, likely, the skills) in-house to support it.
“I understand why people have concerns about this, but I hope voters look at the full picture of everything that I’ve done”, she stated.
Senior officials said there was no evidence Clinton sought approval to use her personal email account to conduct official business and, according to the inspector general, she was obligated to do so.
CLINTON: “It was fully above board”.
Lukens said he opted for this solution because although personal email could be checked on standard government computers connected to the department’s system, he described the process as “cumbersome” because passwords had to be changed every eight to 12 weeks. NBC News interview, September.
The inspector general’s findings should put to rest the argument from Clinton die-hards that previous secretaries of state used private email for some official business. “And they asked that we, all of us, go through our e-mails to determine what was work-related and to provide that for them”.
On the campaign trail, Clinton repeatedly said that her practices were allowed by the department. But unless she can show another high-ranking official who operated exclusively from a private server stored in a home, it was, in fact, unique.
One of the employees stressed in one of the meetings that the information being transmitted needed to be preserved to satisfy federal records laws. The same director reportedly “instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again”. The report also said she had violated the Federal Records Act by not turning over all of her emails before she left her job as the nation’s No. 1 diplomat.
THE REPORT: Clinton declined through her lawyer to be interviewed for the report. After prodding by the congressional committee investigating the fatal 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, she returned some 30,000 to the department in December 2014 – almost two years after she left office.
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