But in one email exchange between Clinton and staffer Jake Sullivan from June 17, 2011, the then-secretary advised her aide on sending a set of talking points by email when he had trouble sending them through secure means.
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On Feb. 27, 2011, Clinton was forwarded an email from someone named John Godfrey, whom an aide described to Clinton as “one of our most knowledgeable officers on Libya“.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said the department was unable to find any evidence the document was eventually emailed to Clinton.
“I’m not going to speculate about whether the document being discussed was classified”, the official said.
In fact, Clinton and her staff would send classified information over the server, according to The Federalist.
Delays in document production have been both highlighted and exacerbated by recent FOIA litigation in which a federal judge ordered the State Department to release 55,000 pages of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email correspondence accumulated during her time in office.
As Secretary of State, Clinton used a private email server to conduct official business, and the FBI is now conducting an investigation into the security of those communications.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement that the specific email “raises a host of serious questions and underscores the importance of the various inquiries into the transmittal of classified information through her non-government email server”.
In the latest batch of emails to be released, a message sent by Clinton clears up that question by proving the secretary of state herself ordered an underling to send her some classified info over her unsecure email system. Republicans criticized her, and Clinton publicly apologized, but Democrats – including her closest rival – have dismissed the scandal. “I was surprised that he used personal email account if he is at State”, she wrote. Why is it just now being released?
Clinton has taken for conducting business via her private email account and maintaining a personal server at her Westchester, New York, home.
The report also found that the Office of the Secretary’s Executive Secretariat, which is responsible for searching its records for FOIA requests regarding the secretary of state and other senior officials, did “not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness”.
Another e-mail exchange showed Clinton wasn’t above bending the rules.
But the inspector general said even as the number of requests skyrocketed, the department cut funding for the division responsible for handling the requests – adding to what seemed to outsiders to be a veil of secrecy surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s activities at the department.
It’s unclear whether the talking points themselves contained classified information.
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It continued, “The State Department is also criticized for practices that ‘do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness'”.
