The State Department is holding a press briefing as I write this. A gaggle of right wing nut job reporters is hazing Spokesperson Mark Toner with endless questions about a new State Department IG report on Hillary Clinton's email. It's obvious they didn't read It and it didn't take long for them to start answering each others' questions with delirious nonsense about an FBI indictment that appears before them, like a mirage in the desert.
I read the IG report so that you don't have to. The IG evaluated email use on non-government servers under five Secretaries of State, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.
Longstanding problems were identified. Remedies were recommended and approved. Now the Inspector General considers the matter to be resolved and the saga of Hillary's email server is coming to an end.
In the gory details, Hillary's foes may find a phrase or two to cherry pick as proof of her misdeeds. However, the report points out:
“OIG did find evidence that various staff and senior officials throughout the Department had discussions related to the Secretary’s use of non-Departmental systems, suggesting there was some awareness of Secretary Clinton’s practices. (p.41)
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Secretary Clinton wasn’t the first or the only State Department officer to use a private email account. The report says that email practices among officers and employees varied. Instead of providing his own explanation how this laissez-faire situation came about, the Inspector General quotes an email sent by a former Policy Planning Director to Hillary in 2011:
“State’s technology is so antiquated that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively.” (p.23) |
The report says that Secretary Colin Powell sent "emails via his personal email account to his “principal assistants, individual ambassadors, and foreign minister colleagues . . . he did not retain those emails or make printed copies . . . he generally sent emails to his staff via their State Department email addresses but he personally does not know whether the Department captured those emails on its servers.
Secretary Clinton kept copies of her email and she turned them in when asked.
"In December 2014, in response to Department requests, Secretary Clinton produced . . . from her personal email account approximately 55,000 hard-copy pages, representing approximately 30,000 emails that she believed related to official business. In a letter to the Department, her representative stated that it was the Secretary’s practice to email Department officials at their government email accounts on matters pertaining to the conduct of government business. Accordingly, the representative asserted, to the extent that the Department retained records of government email accounts, the Department already had records of the Secretary’s email preserved within its recordkeeping systems."
The report says that it was up to officials and employees to ensure that records were incorporated into files or electronic recordkeeping systems (p.12). But it goes on to say that the State Department's hard copy emails on file were "difficult to retrieve. As an illustration, almost 3,000 boxes, each filled with hundreds of pages of documents, would have to be reviewed manually, on a page-by-page basis . . . " (p.17) The electronic storage system that was supposed to be a solution was " difficult to use, and has some technical problems." (p.17)
The report concludes:
Longstanding systemic weaknesses related to electronic messages and communications have existed within the Office of the Secretary that go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State.
Nevertheless, the Department generally and the Office of the Secretary in particular have been slow to recognize 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. OIG expects that its recommendations will move the Department steps closer to meaningfully addressing these risks. (p.45)
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Secretary of State John Kerry hired a Transparency Coordinator, Janice Jacobs, to fix the problems which extend to the State Department’s FOIA unit.
Her memo to the Inspector General is included in the report and it confirms that Hillary is in the clear. It says:
The National Archives and Records Administration concluded that our efforts with respect to Secretary Clinton and her senior staff mitigated past problems, as has a federal district court in a suit brought under the Federal Records Act. As you note in the report, you concur with this conclusion. (p. 69)
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The State Department IG report is linked in the second paragraph of the story and it’s linked below, too.