Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she’s confident voters would make the “right decision” despite concerns over findings by an internal government watchdog that her use of a private email server while secretary of state broke government rules.
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But the release of yesterday’s report by the State Department Inspector General on her emails was imbued with a sense of deja vu. Clinton has withheld thousands of additional emails, saying they were personal.Critics have questioned whether her server might have made a tempting target for hackers, especially those working with or for foreign intelligence services.Separately from the State Department audit, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been investigating whether Clintons use of the private email server imperiled government secrets.
Clinton first admitted to exclusively using a private email account to send and receive work-related emails while she served as secretary of state in March 2015.
The report concluded that the email server set up at Clinton’s NY home had violated federal rules for how government business is conducted.
“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 report said.
As The Associated Press further notes, Clinton and several of her senior staffers declined to be interviewed for the investigation – which flies in the face of earlier public declarations that she was willing to “talk to anybody, anytime” about the issue and that she had encouraged her staff to follow suit. However, Lukens said, Clinton was “very comfortable” using a BlackBerry – even though she would have to leave her office to use the device due to security protocols.
The inspector general looked at all five secretaries of state in the digital age. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not respond to emailed questions Thursday.
Lukens initially said he wanted to make it easier for Clinton to bypass the department’s computer network so she could log on with fewer passwords, before acknowledging that Clinton could not access the system without a department email account.
Clinton told another aide in May of that year that she was anxious about a suspicious link she found in her email.
Mrs. Clinton refused, saying she didn’t “want any risk of the personal being accessible”. Now while Clinton would not cooperate with the state department investigation she says she is cooperating with the FBI investigation into these e-mails, George. Abedin, Mills, Sullivan and Reines all also used private email addresses to conduct business, along with their government accounts.
Officials in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the Bureau of Information Resource Management testified that they approved no such email server setup because it would have compromised the security of the department. “I’ve been more transparent than anybody I can think of in public life”, Clinton said to CBS News.
The AP has obtained more than 900 pages of Abedin emails from the State Department as part of a continuing production of documents under a public records lawsuit filed past year. Much of what is known about the system and why she used it remains clouded by the lack of documentary evidence and Clinton’s own reluctance to discuss the sensitive topic. But none of the three newly-disclosed emails to Abedin were found in those records.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton appeared at Shomburg Center in Harlem to outline her vision for America’s future. The other staff member was told that their mission was to support the secretary, and that they were to “never speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again”.
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“OIG did not attempt to determine whether these productions were complete”, the report said.
