A watchdog report leaked to news outlets on Wednesday concluded that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton violated the Federal Records Act by improperly using a personal email server during her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.
The State Department Inspector General’s 83-page probe criticized the current Democratic presidential frontrunner for not properly reporting official government emails that were sent and received through the private server.
“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 inquiry found. It added that “at a minimum,” Clinton should have turned over all her email related to government business before leaving her post at the department.
“Because she did not do so, she did not comply with the department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act,” the IG charged.
The watchdog stated that the batch of approximately 30,000 emails that Clinton handed over to the State Department in 2014 “was incomplete.”
The presidential hopeful’s staffers were also implicated in the report for violating the Federal Records Act. Four aids reportedly used their personal email to conduct government business in nearly “72,000 pages worth of messages.”
The report also noted that Clinton’s team never requested permission from the department to use the private server, and never provided assurances that the arrangement met even “minimum information security requirements.”
Clinton had claimed that emails sent from her personal address were properly cataloged because they were sent to recipients with a “state.gov” inbox. The IG, however, ruled that “sending emails from a personal account to other employees at their Department accounts is not an appropriate method of preserving any such emails that would constitute a federal record.”
The oversight report goes beyond Clinton and knocks federal records management at the entire State Department. It found personal email non-compliance issues dating back to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, President George W. Bush’s top envoy from 2001-2005.
The IG concluded that “longstanding, systemic weaknesses” in record keeping “go well beyond the tenure of any one secretary of state.”
A January report by the watchdog found that the State Department spends on more than four times longer responding to requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act requests than the average federal agency.
