State Department Report Shows Clinton Violated Policy, Further Weakening Her Candidacy

Clinton Email Cartoon Deleted

An audit from the State Department Inspector found that Hillary Clinton did not comply with email policies. AP and CBS report:

A State Department audit has faulted Hillary Clinton and previous secretaries of state for poorly managing email and other computer information and slowly responding to new cybersecurity risks.

The Associated Press, which obtained the report, says that the audit cites “longstanding, systemic weaknesses” related to communications. These started before Clinton’s appointment as secretary of state, but her failures were singled out as more serious.

CBS News has also obtained a copy of the report, which singles out Clinton among her predecessors.

“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,” the report reads.

It goes on to say that Clinton produced 55,000 pages of emails to mitigate her failure to preserve the emails, but the inspector general “notes that Secretary Clinton’s production [of 55,000 pages of emails] was incomplete.” The report also says that the 55,000 pages included no emails from the first few months of her tenure as secretary for either received or sent messages.

The report also indicates that Clinton and her close advisers failed to cooperate with the investigation, and also suggests attempts at covering up their actions. This includes “how some technology staff said they were instructed to not talk of Clinton’s email set-up after they raised concerns about the unusual arrangement.” The report raised security concerns, along with the failure to report the incidents:

It states that a non-State adviser to Bill Clinton, who was the original user of the server later taken over by Hillary Clinton, shut down the server in early 2011 because of hacking concerns.

“On January 9, 2011, the non-Departmental advisor to President Clinton who provided technical support to the Clinton email system notified the Secretary’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations that he had to shut down the server because he believed ‘someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to,’” the report says. “Later that day, the advisor again wrote to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, ‘We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min.’”

The report goes on to detail another incident in May and says that Clinton and her staff did not appropriate report the matters.

“Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information,” it says. “However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her staff reported these incidents to computer security personnel or anyone else within the Department.”

Since the scandal broke, Clinton has claimed she was allowed to do use her email system. Factcheckers have repeatedly demonstrated that this was untrue. Clinton supporters have been falsely claiming that the State Department cleared her for months based upon twisting statements from spokesmen which in no way cleared her. This should put an end to that claim.

Clinton apologists are already trying to spin this as favorable to Clinton, including that it is helpful that this report came out now as opposed to in the fall. However, there is no doubt that Donald Trump will be raising this and multiple other scandals throughout the campaign. There are also other investigations and court cases in progress which can provide further unfavorable news, making it risky for Democrats to go into a general election campaign with Clinton the nominee

Clinton apologists are also stressing that the report also criticized the actions of Colin Powell. This is a poor defense. New rules were put into place following this and other abuses under George W. Bush. Hillary Clinton was well aware of this, and even accused the Bush administration of shredding the Constitution over their use of private email and other matters in 2007. Stricter rules were initiated by the Obama administration in 2009 in response, and it is inexcusable that Clinton ignored them. It is hardly a defense of Clinton that someone else violated the rules, especially when a major criticism of Clinton from the left is that both her behavior and her policies are far too close to what we rejected under Bush.

This scandal demonstrates Clinton’s hostility towards government transparency, her view that she is above the rules, her dishonesty, and her poor judgment. All of these attributes will make her a weak general election candidate if nominated, and a poor president if elected. Clinton is already struggling in the polls against Trump, while Sanders maintains a strong lead. With the deterioration in Clinton’s support, which is likely to continue, the superdelegates should remedy the situation by throwing their support to Bernie Sanders.

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