While Clinton and her defenders say other secretaries of state, notably Colin Powell, used personal email while in office, the report this week said that by the time Clinton took the job, the rules were clearer and the dangers better known.
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No one at the State Department told her to use a government email address, and she never asked permission to use a private account or the email server at her private home.
While she’s a mere 74 delegates from capturing her party’s nomination, Clinton has been unable to edge her primary rival out of the race – or win over his most passionate backers. But, the AP pointed out, “Clinton and several of her senior staff declined to be interviewed” for the investigation.
“As I said many times, it was a mistake and if I could go back, I would have done it differently”, she said.
The Clinton campaign has released a 203-word statement largely dismissing the criticisms in the inspector- general’s report on the e-mail practices of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The next morning, Secretary Clinton replied to the email with the following message to the Under Secretary: “Is this really from you?”
The report also criticized Clinton for not adhering to the department’s rules for handling records under the Federal Records Act once she stepped down in January 2013. Though the report acknowledges “longstanding, systemic weaknesses” in the State Department, it singles Clinton out for far more serious violations.
Something else from the IG’s report that firmly rebuts Clinton’s defense: “Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information”. I have turned over all my emails.
In a two-hour deposition with the conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch last week, Lewis Lukens also said he offered to set up a “stand-alone” computer for Clinton to check her personal email account, only to be told that she “does not know how to use a computer to do email”. But it identified three officials who used it exclusively: Clinton, Powell and a former ambassador to Kenya, Scott Gration.
“It’s remarkable, truly remarkable, there was no cooperation with the office of the inspector general”. In fact, she, or members of her team, deleted about 30,000 of them before an investigation of her practices began.
Clinton has claimed she only used private email for her daughter’s wedding and yoga classes.
“She’s as crooked as they come”, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, said of Clinton at a campaign rally in Anaheim, California, adding that the report’s findings were “not good” for her. Clinton’s campaign disagreed, saying the report rebutted Republican’s criticism.
In any case, the existence of the messages renews concerns that Clinton was not completely forthcoming when she turned over work-related emails to the State Department, which evidently found these emails only after releasing the documents Clinton herself provided in March 2015.
Whether Clinton should be charged with anything other than poor judgment remains unclear.
The CIA has since marked 22 emails on Clinton’s server classified, though the emails were not classified when they were sent, only after they were reviewed and found to have contained information that could not be released to the public for national security reasons. Marcel Lazar, the Romanian computer hacker calling himself “Guccifer”, claims to have hacked into Clinton’s servers. There is no evidence Clinton reached out. Whether those hackers were ultimately successful fell outside the scope of the audit.
At the time, Ms. Clinton was doing exactly that.
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In his testimony, Lukens, a Foreign Service officer for 27 years who oversaw 110 employees providing administrative support to the secretary, said he never recalled speaking about Clinton’s email address or use of a personal BlackBerry with a direct subordinate, John Bentel, in charge of the secretariat’s electronic communications.
