A new report from the State Department’s internal watchdog raises questions about Hillary Clinton’s justification for using a private email account as secretary of state.
Clinton claimed on Tuesday that “the vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.”
But consistent archiving of such records seems unlikely given the findings of the inspector general, which released its report on Wednesday.
The IG found that out of more than a billion emails sent by State Department employees in 2011, only 61,156 were archived as official records using the agencies SMART system. That fell to 41,749 in 2013, the same year Clinton left office.
SMART requires employees to manually designate individual emails as official records.
While the audit did not analyze the records-handling practices of top-level agency officials such as Clinton, deputy secretaries, undersecretaries and their aides — the report notes that they utilize a separate records system — the IG’s findings suggest that any emails Clinton may have exchanged with other agency employees would not have been archived.
It had already been established that many of Clinton’s official government emails were never recorded. She turned over 55,000 pages of emails only in December. And it was revealed that many of her aides used private email addresses.
This flouting of federal and agency requirements was evidenced by the fact that numerous Freedom of Information Act requests submitted to State were denied based on claims that no such records could be found. (RELATED: State Department Refusing To Answer How It Handled Open Records Requests For Hillary’s Emails)
In its report, the IG tied the agency’s widespread non-compliance to employees’ inadequate training and to others who avoided recording emails “because they do not want to make the email available in searches or fear that this availability would inhibit debate about pending decisions.”
IG spokesman Douglas Welty told The Daily Caller that the audit was not expedited for release because of the Clinton scandal.
“The timing of the release of this report…was purely coincidental to the recent email issue,” Welty said.
The new audit comes just a day after another report dinged the Department for its handling of FOIA requests. The Center for Effective Government gave the agency an “F” grade on that measure. State was rated dead last, far behind the next worst federal agency. That’s despite State not having an unusually high number of requests compared to other agencies. (RELATED: ‘Dismal’ State Department Given An ‘F’ On Transparency)
