Emails report faults Clinton

It also cites ‘systemic weaknesses’ that preceded her

Hillary Clinton, campaigning Wednesday in Buena Park, Calif., didn’t respond to questions from reporters about the State Department email investigation.
Hillary Clinton, campaigning Wednesday in Buena Park, Calif., didn’t respond to questions from reporters about the State Department email investigation.

WASHINGTON -- The State Department's inspector general criticized Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received it if she had.

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For the 83-page report delivered Wednesday to members of Congress, the inspector general looked into the email practices of five secretaries of state and generally concluded that record-keeping has been spotty for years.

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 report also broadly criticizes the State Department, saying that officials had been "slow to recognize and to manage effectively the legal requirements and cybersecurity risks" that emerged in the era of emails, particularly those of senior officials like Clinton.

It says inspectors "found no evidence" that Clinton had requested or received approval from anyone at the department to conduct official state business using her personal email account, and that she "had an obligation" to discuss that use with the officials who are responsible for handling records and security.

The report says department officials "did not -- and would not -- approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business."

"By Secretary Clinton's tenure, the department's guidance was considerably more detailed and more sophisticated," the report concludes. "Secretary Clinton's cybersecurity practices accordingly must be evaluated in light of these more comprehensive directives."

The inspector general also made a series of recommendations for the department, and a State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said the recommendations will be implemented.

The report includes interviews with Secretary of State John Kerry and former secretaries Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. It says Clinton declined to be interviewed. The inspector general, Steve Linick, was appointed by President Barack Obama and has served since 2013.

The report says four of Clinton's closest State Department aides -- Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, policy chief Jake Sullivan and strategy aide Philippe Reines -- all declined interview requests.

An FBI investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified material through her use of the private server is still underway. FBI Director James Comey has said there is no "external deadline" for concluding that investigation.

The report does not delve into the FBI's investigation over the emails containing classified information.

Clinton, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has played down the inquiries, saying she would cooperate with investigators to put the email issue behind her.

Campaigning in California this week, Clinton didn't mention the report and didn't respond to questions from reporters about its findings.

Clinton's campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, issued a statement pointing to the findings that the problems with record-keeping extended beyond Clinton's tenure.

"Contrary to the false theories advanced for some time now, the report notes that her use of personal email was known to officials within the Department during her tenure, and that there is no evidence of any successful breach of the Secretary's server," Fallon said in the statement.

Hacking attempt

The report says the State Department issued numerous warnings dating back a decade about the cybersecurity risks of using personal email accounts for government business. Clinton never showed that the server or the mobile device she used while in office "met minimum information security requirements," it says.

Twice in 2010, information-management staff members at the State Department raised concerns that Clinton's email practices failed to meet federal records-keeping requirements, to which the director responded that Clinton's personal email system had been reviewed and approved by the legal staff, "and that the matter was not to be discussed any further."

Clinton was personally sent a memo in 2011 warning of hackers trying to target unclassified, personal email accounts. She also was given a classified, in-person briefing on the dangers, the report says.

In November 2010, her deputy chief of staff for operations prodded her about "putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam." Clinton, however, replied that she would consider a separate address or device, "but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible."

The report also disclosed an attempt by someone to hack into Clinton's server on Jan. 9, 2011.

It said a "nondepartmental adviser" to Bill Clinton informed the department that he had shut down the system because "someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in, I didn't want to let them have a chance."

The hacking attempt continued later that day, prompting another official to write to two of Hillary Clinton's top aides, Mills and Sullivan, to warn them not to send the secretary of state "anything sensitive." She said she would "explain more in person."

The report also criticized Hillary Clinton for not adhering to the department's rules for handling records under the Federal Records Act once she stepped down in January 2013.

"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," the report said.

Clinton later released 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department, which she said were all the records "in her custody."

But investigators determined that her production of those records was "incomplete," and they found gaps in the documents that she turned over.

Day-to-day use

The report finds that while dozens of State Department employees used personal email accounts periodically over the years, only three officials were found to have used them "exclusively" for day-to-day operations: Clinton, Powell and Scott Gration, who was ambassador to Kenya from 2011-12.

The report concluded that Powell -- who has acknowledged publicly that he used a personal email account to conduct business in President George W. Bush's administration -- failed to follow department policy designed to comply with public-record laws.

While State Department officials never directly told Powell or Clinton that the two needed to end their use of personal email, the report says, they did do so with Gration.

The response to Gration's situation "demonstrates how such usage is normally handled when department cybersecurity officials become aware of it," the report says.

State Department security officials warned Gration in 2011 -- while Clinton was secretary of state -- that he was not authorized to be using personal email for government business in Kenya. He continued doing so anyway, however, and the State Department initiated disciplinary action against him over "his failure to follow these directions" and several other undisclosed infractions, the report says. He resigned in 2012 before any discipline was imposed.

In his interview for the report, Kerry acknowledged that he had used a personal account at times during his transition between leaving the Senate and joining the State Department, but that after becoming secretary and discussing the issue with aides, he "began primarily using his Department email account to conduct official business."

Kerry said that while he occasionally responded to people who emailed him on his personal account, he would preserve the records.

Information for this article was contributed by Steven Lee Myers, Eric Lichtblau and Amy Chozick of The New York Times; by Michael Biesecker, Bradley Klapper, Stephen Braun, Chad Day, Jack Gillum and Lisa Lerer of The Associated Press; and by Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger, Carol Morello and Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post.

A Section on 05/26/2016

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