Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton meets with attendees during a campaign stop, Monday, April 25, 2016, at City Hall in Philadelphia.
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Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton said Wednesday night a State Department report critical of her use of a private email server is not “going to affect either the campaign or my presidency”.
Clinton’s likely general election opponent, Republican Donald Trump, called the report “devastating”. Lukens said that he didn’t question how Clinton communicated, although he knew she did not have an official state.gov e-mail account. (Apparently, some messages from Clinton’s private account were being intercepted by the department’s spam filter.) Clinton replied to Abedin, “Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible”.
The ultimate impact of Clinton’s email controversy on her campaign will not be known until after the Federal Bureau of Investigation announces its findings.
“As I said many times, it was a mistake and if I could go back, I would have done it differently”, she said. But hundreds were censored for national security reasons and 22 emails were completely withheld because the agency said they contained top secret material – a matter now under investigation by the FBI. “She repeatedly ignored warnings not to use private email during her tenure as secretary of state”.
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 the OIG report reveals that officials from the Under Secretary for Management and the Office of the Legal Adviser found no proof of any written approval or that a review was conducted by other State Department staff of the Clinton private server.
Clinton has maintained that none of her emails had been marked “classified” when she sent them and, after her own lawyers had removed mails they deemed purely personal, she submitted 52,000 pages of her emails to the State Department, which has reviewed all the documents.
South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the special House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks, said that the inspector general’s report has brought these facts to light because of “congressional oversight”. She has even acknowledged, once or twice, that using a private server wasn’t a good idea.
The emails appear to contain work-related passages, raising questions about why they were not turned over to the State Department past year. It also complicated federal archiving of her emails, in turn making it more hard to obtain them under the Freedom of Information Act.
According to Lukens, he first spoke to Clinton’s Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills in 2009 about ways that Clinton could access her personal email without using the State Department’s OpenNet system.
When asked if she has reached out to the Sanders campaign in an effort to unify the party, Clinton said both campaigns are “certainly” communicating. She said the report showed weaknesses in the system that included other high-ranking government officials.
On Thursday morning, Donald Trump tweeted, “The Inspector General’s report on Crooked Hillary Clinton is a disaster”.
In an interview with KMEX Los Angeles on Wednesday, Clinton commented on the State Department’s inspector general’s report that says that she violated the rules as Secretary of State claiming, “Well, there may be reports that come out, but nothing has changed, it’s the same story”.
The State Department inspector general issued an audit report blistering Clinton for flouting federal records “rules” and cybersecurity guidelines and for refusing to cooperate with the IG’s investigation.
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Over time, through media accounts and now details in the inspector general’s report, a clearer picture has emerged of Clinton’s email system and its use: A basement computer, running Microsoft server software, directly connected to the internet to handle communications between Clinton and her aides.
