Clinton’s campaign was rocked this week by a State Department Inspector General report released Wednesday that found she failed to follow the rules or inform key department staff regarding her use of a private email server.
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“There may be reports that come out, but nothing has changed”, Clinton said.
“Everything I had to say was out there”, she told Blitzer.
“By Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the department’s guidance was considerably more detailed and more sophisticated”, the report concluded. “Secretary Clinton’s cybersecurity practices accordingly must be evaluated in light of these more comprehensive directives”.
Bentel told the staff member that State Department legal staff had “reviewed and approved” the server- though the inspector general’s review found no evidence such a review had ever occurred.
The report includes interviews with Secretary of State John Kerry and former secretaries Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice.
ATTORNEY: You traveled with Mrs. Clinton on all of her foreign travel, or – while you were there? The inspector general, Steve Linick, was appointed by President Barack Obama and has served since 2013.
He said he didn’t know if she was conducting official business on a private server or with a non-governmental email address. FBI Director James Comey has said there is no “external deadline” for concluding that investigation.
Clinton has acknowledged in the campaign that the homebrew email setup in her NY home was a mistake.
Clinton, also campaigning in California, didn’t mention the controversy and ignored reporters’ shouted questions. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not respond to emailed questions Thursday.
“My understanding was that she was using the equipment to contact family and friends”, said Lukens, a former deputy executive secretary at the State Department. Abedin, Mills, Sullivan and Reines all also used private email addresses to conduct business, along with their government accounts.
According to the report, two Clinton’s immediate staff discussed via email in May, 2011, that Clinton was concerned that someone was “hacking into her email” after she received an email with a suspicious link.
The inspector general’s office examined email record-keeping under five US Secretaries of State, both Democratic and Republican.
While he knew that she did not have a state.gov account, Lukens “assumed that she was using a commercially available email account”, such as Yahoo or Google. “We were attacked again so I shut (the server) down for a few min”, he said.
In November 2010, her deputy chief of staff for operations prodded her about “putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam”.
“I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible”, Clinton said. The group also has asked to depose Clinton in another case.
“I have provided all of my work-related emails, and I’ve asked that they be made public, and I think that demonstrates that I wanted to make sure that this information was part of the official records”, Clinton said, according to an interview transcript provided by ABC News.
The report singled out one Clinton aide who sent 9 emails a day using a personal account. “Many people did. It was not at all unprecedented”.
The report examined record keeping laws, policies and practices at the State Department from 1997 to present. Making a point against his political rival, Trump said that the report’s findings were “not good” for her.
The existence of the messages renews concerns that Clinton was not completely forthcoming when she turned over work-related emails to the State Department.
But investigators determined that her production of those records was “incomplete”, and they found gaps in the documents that she turned over.
As late as 2011, State Department officials were still trying to get Clinton to use a government-issued blackberry.
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The report concluded that Powell – who has acknowledged publicly that he used a personal email account to conduct business in President George W. Bush’s administration – failed to follow department policy created to comply with public-record laws. However, Clinton has withheld thousands of additional emails, claiming they are personal.
