State Dep’t misses court deadline for Clinton emails

The department has now released 82 percent, or 43,148, of the 55,000 pages of emails Clinton turned over after she left office.

Not volunteering the information was most damning charge in a report issued today by the Office of the Inspector General, which investigated the State Department’s responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. “Furthermore, the FOIA analyst has no way to independently locate federal records from such accounts unless employees take steps to preserve official emails in department record-keeping systems”.

In testimony to the House oversight committee Thursday, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Julia Frifield admitted they “have struggled to keep pace with the increasing demands of congressional document requests”.

On Thursday, the State Department inspector general released a scathing report on the department’s handling of Clinton’s e-mail records and the release of federal records generally, claiming that public-records officers gave “inaccurate and incomplete” information to the public.

Senior State Department staff provided the department’s FOIA office – also known as the Office of Information Programs and Services – with the location of Clinton’s calendars, which had been “retired”, according to the IG report. “FOIA neither authorizes nor requires agencies to search for Federal records in personal email accounts maintained on private servers or through commercial providers (for example, Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail)”, the report states.

“There’s a lawsuit against Secretary of State John Kerry to force action on Clinton emails, a second for records of talking points given to Ambassador Rice regarding the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and another for records on State Department’s “Special Government Employment” status for Clinton aide Huma Abedin”. At that time, officials told Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics they had no information or documentation of the former Secretary’s email accounts aside from her official, government one.

The issue is one of many that has dogged the State Department for years.

Despite those and other problems, the report said, State has not sent an official notice to department employees reminding them of their obligations under FOIA since March 2009, a month after Clinton took office.

The inquiry found that the secretary’s office nearly never searched its own email in public-records requests before 2011.

The 2012 request by CREW was sparked by the discovery that Lisa Jackson, then-administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, had been using an alias email at work with the name “Richard Windsor”, largely for personal communication. “However, OIG found no evidence to indicate that any of these senior officials reviewed the search results or approved the response to CREW”.

To sum this up, an FOIA request for a list of Hillary Clinton’s email addresses was filed in December of 2012.

WND has reported multiple times on the Clinton email scandal, including the fact that numerous Clinton emails were secret or classified, and still were housed on a private server that for a time wasn’t even encrypted.

“The searches performed by S/ES do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness”, the Evaluation of the Department of State’s FOIA Processes for Requests Involving the Office of the Secretary report said. The inspector general found that Mills tasked a member of her staff to follow up on the request.