According a State Department inspector general report obtained by Politico and AP, Hillary Clinton did not comply with the agency’s policies on records,and despite what she claims, neither the Democratic Party nominee or her top aides cooperated with the review. This is the state department security review, not to be confused with the criminal investigation being done by the FBI.
The report claims the state dept. suffers from “longstanding, systemic weaknesses” with records that “go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State,” but it points out that Clinton is by far the worst offender. “Clinton violated the agency’s email rules when she chose to exclusively use a private email server during her four years at State Department and did not promptly turn over records after she departed the agency.”
As part of the review the IG’s office interviewed Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessors Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. However Clinton and her deputies including Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and Huma Abedin declined requests for interviews. The raises the question why didn’t they cooperate, what were they hiding?
Per the report Clinton ignored the rules and never sought advice from the IT folks.
Despite guidelines to the contrary and never seeking approval, Clinton used mobile devices to conduct official business on her personal email account and private server. She never sought approval from senior information officers, who would have refused the request because of security risks, the audit said.
This past march Clinton said her predecessors did the same thing, and the audit confirms that’s true. But the report also says she did it much more than her predecessors. In fact her predecessor barely used email and used their personal accounts much less.
“By Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the department’s guidance was considerably more detailed and more sophisticated,” it concluded. “Secretary Clinton’s cybersecurity practices accordingly must be evaluated in light of these more comprehensive directives.”
The report goes on to say that despite her claims, Hillary’s use of a private server WAS against the rules:
(…)Therefore, 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 states. “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, 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.”
Even worse, when Hillary Clinton believed that her server was being hacked she didn’t report it to security,
“Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information,” the investigators said. “However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her staff reported these incidents to computer security personnel or anyone else within the Department.”
Note this is based on the reports of others, apparently someone in congress who received the report today leaked it to some venues. The IG’s office has assured me that once the report is actually released to the press it will appear in my email box. Once the full report is received–look for a more detailed review.
