Clinton escapes blame as State Dept. ends investigation

FPI / October 20, 2019

In its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, the State Department found nearly 600 security violations, a report said. But Clinton and her top aides escaped culpability because they had already left the agency when the investigation began.

The investigation concluded that 38 individuals were culpable for 91 security violations. Another 497 violations were found, but no individuals were found culpable in those incidents, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported on Oct. 18.

The State Department did not address findings by investigators who scrutinized the private server and discovered some of its contents had been deleted.

In a report detailing its investigation, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security said that personal email use to conduct official State Department business “represented an increased risk of unauthorized disclosure.”

Related: Hillary Clinton cancels cybersecurity appearance for unspecified reasons, July 5, 2019

Clinton’s use of the private server “added an increased degree of risk of compromise as a private system lacks the network monitoring and intrusion detection capabilities of State Department networks,” the report stated.

Investigators said they were unable to assign culpability in 497 of the security violations because many subjects of the probe, including Clinton and her circle of aides, had left the State Department by the time the investigation began.

“While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience, by and large, the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations,” the report said.

“Instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted via unclassified email were the rare exception and resulted in adjudicated security violations. There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

Clinton exchanged more than 60,000 emails on a private email account hosted on a server that she kept at her residence in New York. She emailed frequently with longtime aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and an outside adviser, Sidney Blumenthal.

In its 2016 investigation of Clinton’s emails, the FBI had determined that thousands of the emails on Clinton’s server contained some level of classified information.

Some of those emails were found to have information classified as top secret, the highest level of classification, yet then-FBI Director James Comey said in July 2016 he would not recommend charges against Clinton, saying only she was “extremely careless” in using the private server.

Free Press International