State Department Inspector General's Clinton email report has leaked

Bits and pieces are already starting to leak, including a story of a staffer who questioned the Clinton email arrangements and was told to never speak of it again. That's evidence to support not just negligence, but knowing and deliberate disregard for the rules pertaining to classified information. In other words, the Clinton operation knew their arrangement was improper, did it anyway, and did their best to keep it secret.

More than that, the IG concluded that:
Clinton violated the Federal Records Act with her server arrangement
Did not cooperate with the investigation
Did not turn over records as required
Worse, she claimed to turn over her records, but the IG located records she should have turned over that were not (meaning she lied about what she deleted)

Even the Washington Post editorial board calls her server inexcusable.

One telling quote that ended up in the report:

ObserverWhy the reluctance to obey the law? The OIG found an email in which Ms. Clinton tells her deputy chief of staff for operations, “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.” This appears on document page 38 and leads to footnote 152. Tactical and operational dodging? Looks like it.

Anyone who has worked in or for a government agency in any capacity, and often large corporations, gets regular training on how to preserve records and properly handle sensitive information. That training pretty much universally specifies that the computer (or other devices) which the government provides to you for communication is still owned by the government and the contents of that device can be reviewed. Those instructions generally note that the way to avoid having the government review everything is to use separate accounts for your official business and your personal affairs.

That is, to "avoid any risk of the personal being accessible", Clinton should have rigorously maintained separation of her personal business on a personal device from her official business on an official device.

Instead, she chose to conduct both personal and public business on a private server. This was exactly the wrong decision because it destroys the separation that is intended to protect the personal privacy of government employees. And that's before getting into whether any of those emails were classified.

This entry was published Fri May 27 11:31:24 CDT 2016 by TriggerFinger and last updated 2016-05-27 11:31:24.0. [Tweet]

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