The Office of the Inspector General for the State Department released a lengthy report on Wednesday. The details of the report show a pattern of willful secrecy and the tendency to consistently bend and skirt safety precautions by Hillary Clinton in order to keep her personal email server secret.
In the report, investigators point out a litany of instances where Clinton and her aides clearly violated protocol by not informing the agency of her intent to set up the server, or contacting them when they had feared the server may be under attack from outside hackers.
Also startling is when questions regarding the legality and safety of the private server were brought up by federal employees within the Bureau of Information Resource Management, they were told that the server had been approved by legal staff and were ordered by their superior “…never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.”
CNN has gone over the leaked report that was sent to lawmakers and notes that included in the report was a refutation of the claim that the server was approved:
…the report notes that interviews with officials from the Undersecretary for Management and the Office of the Legal Adviser found “no knowledge of approval or review by other Department staff” of the server.
Another damning allegation was that Clinton regularly transmitted information through her server that was designated as ‘SBU,’ which is ‘Sensitive But Unclassified.’ The policy in place was that all devices that operated outside of the State Department’s network should be secure and approved by the Bureau of Information Resource Management.
Politico covered the story that the report refutes any such communication between Clinton and the IRM ever occurred:
“…OIG found no evidence that Secretary Clinton ever contacted IRM to request such a solution, despite the fact that emails exchanged on her personal account regularly contained information marked as SBU,” the report states.
The revelations in this report contradict Clinton’s previous comments to the press regarding her private server. In repeated interviews with major networks, Hillary unequivocally states on the record that all of her activity was “above board” and had been approved of.
Among the findings in the report are claims that Clinton not only didn’t turn over her records voluntarily when she left the office (another breach of protocol), but that when she was prompted to, several months of emails were missing altogether.
Perhaps most troubling is that not all of the information transmitted from the server was as low level as standard SBU’s. CNN reports on a story from January where another Inspector General raised concerns of a higher degree:
In January the Inspector General for intelligence agencies wrote a letter to Congress saying that two government agencies flagged emails on Clinton’s server as containing classified information, including some on “special access programs,” which are a subset of the highest “Top Secret” level of classification, but are subject to more stringent control rules than even other Top Secret information.
So far, Clinton’s spokespeople have suggested that all of this information is trumped up and politically motivated, even going so far as to say that they suspect collusion between officials at the accusing agencies and Congressional Republicans.
