It calls out Powell for also violating department policy for his use of a personal email account while in office.
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“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary”, the report said.
At a press conference in March, 2015, Clinton said she had exchanged about 60,000 emails from her private email account during her stint in the Obama administration, among which about half were personal and thus deleted.
The report says department officials “did not – and would not – approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business”.
Although Clinton and her aides have agreed to cooperate in an ongoing FBI investigation into the affair, none would comply with the independent audit.
The scandal over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state returned on Wednesday to dog her presidential campaign.
During the first briefing, a reporter asked about a November 2011 email in which Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, broached the idea of providing her a State Department email account and making widely known within the agency. The State Department had distributed copies to members of Congress prior to its official release.
A reporter on Wednesday quoted from that email, then asked the State Department where they got it – and why it wasn’t made public before this.
Of Clinton’s 26 aides, only five answered the IG’s questionnaire.
Clinton’s account came to light during the probes into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
But while the report acknowledges personal email use by previous secretaries, it also notes that the rules for preserving work emails sent from a personal email account were updated in 2009, the year Clinton took office.
The AP declined to share the original report with Anadolu Agency but said it would be officially released Thursday.
The report says “longstanding systemic weaknesses” in handling electronic records went “well beyond the tenure of any one secretary of state”, but the body of the report focuses on the emails that Clinton sent and received on her private server.
The State Department inspector general on Wednesday said Clinton disregarded various guidelines for avoiding cybersecurity risks.
Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, released a statement this afternoon accusing Clinton’s political opponents of misrepresenting the report for “partisan purposes”. There is one section of the report which reveals that technology staffers who raised concerns about Clinton’s use of email in late 2010 were told to stop talking about it.
Hillary Clinton’s State Department e-mails were going to be a campaign issue anyway.
Current Secretary of State Kerry asked Steve Linick, the State Department inspector general, to investigate after Clinton’s email arrangement came to light past year. Her technical support advisor told operations staff “someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to”. Or it could be that when her emails were being reviewed by her staff in 2014 that the record was determined not to have been work-related. Colin Powell, who served under President George W. Bush, has said he used private email as part of an effort to upgrade State Department communications and that none of his records were preserved.
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Even so, the federal government has standards for how servers are built, how they are secured, and how their data is stored, and it is still unclear how much classified information was shared on the server or what particular safeguards were taken to protect it.
