State Department’s watchdog rebukes Clinton over emails

WASHINGTON - The U.S. State Department's internal watchdog has concluded that Hillary Clinton clearly broke its rules when using a private email server as secretary of state, saying the practice created a security risk and violated transparency and disclosure policies.

The highly critical report, sent Wednesday to Capitol Hill, is certain to create more political problems for the Democratic presidential front-runner by feeding into the narrative Republican opponents long have worked to build: that Clinton does not follow the same rules as everyone else and has not been open with the public.

The department's inspector general found she engaged in emailing practices that exposed sensitive information to breach, disregarded policies that discouraged such methods of communicating and failed to promptly turn over all relevant correspondence.

The report does not criticize only Clinton. It also found a Republican predecessor, Colin Powell, to have committed similar violations. That may somewhat help inoculate her against the partisan attack the report is certain to generate.

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said Wednesday the report confirmed the State Department has had long-standing systemic problems with its practices.

'While political opponents of Hillary Clinton are sure to misrepresent this report for their own partisan purposes, in reality, the inspector general documents just how consistent her email practices were with those of other secretaries and senior officials at the State Department who also used personal email,” he said.

One section of the report reveals that technology staffers who raised concerns about Clinton's use of email in late 2010 were told to stop talking about it. One staffer was told the mission was 'to support the Secretary” and to 'never to speak of the Secretary's personal email again.”

Another staffer warned Clinton was sending and receiving emails that needed to be preserved for open records laws. The staffer was told 'that the Secretary's personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further.”

The inspector general's office found no evidence of any such legal review.

The investigation also:

l Revealed that in January 2011, there were two hacking attempts on the Clinton email system in one day. An adviser to former President Bill Clinton tried to shut down the home server.

l Found there were warnings issued to senior State Department officials that hackers were targeting personal email accounts.

l Reported some of Clinton's aides did not cooperate with the investigation. Some of the aides uses personal accounts extensively for work.

Clinton sought to come into compliance with open records requirements in December 2014 - nearly two years after leaving office - by turning over some 30,000 emails she said represented all of her government correspondence during her time there. But since then, emails have emerged that should have been turned over but were not. The inspector general called her document dump 'incomplete.”

Clinton has said she exchanged an equal number of personal messages through her server while she was secretary of state and that those messages had been deleted.

Clinton's campaign has been preparing for the release of this report for months. Earlier in the campaign, it accused the State Department of working with congressional Republicans - including that a former staffer for Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley now works for the inspector general - to undermine her, a charge the office has vehemently denied.

The investigation spanned party lines, digging into the practices of secretaries of state since Madeleine Albright. Albright, Powell, Condoleezza Rice and John F. Kerry agreed to be interviewed for the investigation. Clinton declined.

A potentially larger problem hanging over the Clinton campaign at the moment is the ongoing FBI investigation into her private email server. The agency is looking into whether she mishandled classified information.

FBI officials say they have no deadline, but pressure to finish is increasing as the November election nears.

The Tribune Washington Bureau and the Washington Post contributed to this report.