Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and some of her predecessors violated the government's policies on email use and records retention, the State Department's Inspector General says.
The department's investigative agency made the conclusion in a report released only to members of Congress and obtained by ABC News. The report examined the email practices of five U.S. secretaries of state and found that there was "a limited ability to retrieve email records, inaccessibility of electronic files, failure to comply with requirements for departing employees, and a general lack of oversight."
Clinton's campaign for president has been dogged by questions surrounding last year's revelation that she used a private, home-brewed email account during her entire tenure as secretary of state. She has since turned over many of the emails from her private account, while deleting others she deemed irrelevant to her professional work.
The FBI is investigating the handling of sensitive information on that private email server to determine whether there was any criminal wrongdoing.
The report comes in response to questions from top Democrats on the House and Senate committees of jurisdiction about the email practices of the current and past four secretaries of state and their immediate staff.
About Clinton specifically, the report says she should have preserved federal records she created and received on her personal account, and that sending emails from the personal account to other employees at the department was “not an appropriate method of preserving” federal records.
Secretary of State John Kerry, along with former secretaries Madeline Albright, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, participated in interviews with the inspector general’s office, but Clinton and her aides denied requests to be interviewed.
Clinton's campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, released a statement this afternoon accusing Clinton's political opponents of misrepresenting the report for "paristan purposes." In reality, Fallson said, "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."
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says the report shows that Clinton was not the only secretary to use private email and that she is the only one who has turned them over.
"While Secretary Clinton preserved and returned tens of thousands of pages of her emails to the Department for public release, Secretary Powell returned none," the Maryland Democrat said in an emailed statement. "Republicans need to stop wasting taxpayer dollars singling out Secretary Clinton just because she is running for president."
Cummings also points out that today's report does not accuse Clinton of a crime.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of that committee, suggested Clinton took advantage of the State Department's lax enforcement of email policy. "Those weaknesses may have been exploited by department officials for self-serving purposes,” Chaffetz of Utah said in a statement to the press.
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