Inspector General Says Hillary Clinton Broke Rules, Was Not Allowed To Use Private Email

The U.S. State Department's inspector general on Wednesday sharply criticized Hillary Clinton's personal email server during her time as secretary of state.

The report, delivered to Congress on Wednesday, said Clinton never asked permission to set up the server and that use of private email to conduct state department business would not have been allowed if she had. It says Clinton broke department record-keeping rules and describes a 2011 attack during which Clinton aides told State Department officials not to email her anything sensitive.

The review, which is separate from the FBI's investigation into the email matter, is sure to reignite controversy over what has been a focal point for Clinton's political opponents during the presidential campaign season.

It is a broad criticism of email usage by secretaries of state, including Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and John Kerry. Clinton is not the first Secretary of State to use private email to conduct official business. She is, though, the only one to do so on a proprietary server.

Clinton, through her counsel, declined to be interviewed for the report along with several of her top aides. She has not offered comment or response since its publication, but her campaign spokesman Brian Fallon released the following statement:

The review did not determine whether Clinton knowingly sent or stored information that was classified at the time on her server, which is the focus of the FBI's probe. The CIA has marked 22 of the more than 23,000 emails that passed through her server as classified but did so retroactively.

But the report does say Clinton never had permission to set up the server in the first place.

"Secretary Clinton had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business with their offices, who in turn would have attempted to provide her with approved and secured means that met her business needs," the report said. But officials did not "approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business," it said.

The inspector general's report takes exception to her sending and receiving most of her email on a Blackberry, a device "prohibited in sensitive areas." She never showed officials "that her private server or mobile device met minimum information security requirements."

Clinton also broke State Department record-keeping rules by not turning over her emails as they came in or even while she was in office, the report said. She only provided her emails to the State Department in December 2014, after repeated FOIA requests from outside groups.

"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 said.

Clinton's server was believed to have been attacked in January 2011, according to the review, and was shut down temporarily during that time.

One of Clinton's aides, who did not work for the State Department, told her Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations that “someone was trying to hack us," and the server had to be shut down during that time, the report says.

After learning of another attack that day, the Deputy Chief of Staff emailed two of her other department aides, telling them not to email Clinton "anything sensitive" and told them that Clinton would "explain more in person."

• You can read the report in full here.

Image via Gage Skidmore, Flickr