The existence of the messages renews concerns that Clinton was not completely forthcoming when she turned over work-related emails to the State Department.
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Clinton said voters would look at the full picture of what she had to offer and the “full threat” that Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, posed to the country. Abedin informed Clinton that some within the State Department were not receiving her emails, which were sent from a personal email address. In November 2010, her deputy chief of staff for operations prodded her about “putting you on State email”.
It further said the State Department, and the Secretary of State’s office especially, “have been slow to recognise and to manage effectively the legal requirements and cybersecurity risks associated with electronic data communications, particularly as those risks pertain to its most senior leadership”.
Clinton provided 50,000 pages of official email, as well as her personal server, as part of the investigation.
In a short television interview in Las Vegas, Clinton repeated her long-standing explanation that previous secretaries of state also had used private accounts.
Republicans have used Clinton’s email practice to suggest she was trying to hide government records from scrutiny under public-access laws.
The report, according to the New York Times, also said that department officials “did not – and would not – approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business”. Charles Grassley, the chair of the Senate judiciary committee that’s been probing Clinton’s use of a private server.
But no other secretary of state before her used e-mail as heavily, and the regulations regarding preserving e-mail records have changed over the past two decades. The inspector general noted that Clinton’s production of work-related emails was “incomplete”, missing not only the three emails but numerous others covering Clinton’s first four months in office. As the OIG reported, all State Department employees were instructed, during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, to seek technical guidance from the agency before using non-government email accounts to transmit information considered sensitive but unclassified.
“Nobody wants their personal emails made public”.
The report says that Clinton’s server was “attacked” and that she refused to be interviewed for the audit. It’s about trust and credibility, which is an issue that encompasses every conceivable element of a Clinton presidency including all aspects of domestic policy and foreign relations.
In a report delivered to members of Congress on Wednesday, the inspector general said that Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business” with officials responsible for handling records and security but that inspectors “found no evidence” that she had requested or received approval from anyone at the department to conduct her state business on a personal email.
According to The Hill, an influential United States political website, Judge Emmet Sullivan accepted a plea Cheryl Mills, Mrs Clinton’s former chief of staff, to block publication of video clips of her giving a sworn statement to lawyers.
She did not directly answer questions about whether she still believes that she broke no State Department rules or whether her decision to set up an independent email system was an “error of judgment”.
“With her story crumbling and the Federal Bureau of Investigation continuing to investigate, Democrats must be wondering if it was such a good idea to stack the nominating process in her favor”, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said.
“As this report underscores, agencies across the Federal Government are working to adapt decades-old recordkeeping practices to the email-dominated modern era”, he said in statement.
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The IG report also revealed that Clinton’s server was the subject of a possible hack attempt in early 2011.
