WASHINGTON — A new State Department inspector general's report finds major fault with the department's archival practices, amid the revelation that Hillary Clinton used personal email, then deleted a large portion of the emails from her account.
Despite State officials sending nearly a billion emails during the period the IG examined, only several thousand were properly logged, the new report states.
The records-keeping of Clinton and those immediately below her in the State Department hierarchy was not assessed by the IG. "These assessments do not apply to the system used by the Department's high-level principals, the Secretary, the Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and their immediate staffs, which maintain separate systems," the report notes.
The IG's office rejected the idea on Wednesday that the timing of the report had anything to do with Clinton, an official said.
"It's a report that's been in the works," Doug Welty, Media Relations Officer in the Office of the Inspector General, told BuzzFeed News. "The timing was not calculated in any way shape or form. It had absolutely no direct relation with all the other stuff that might relate to it today. This is a report that's — it's been on our cycle, it happened to be finished and done."
"The Inspector General is independent - they will have to speak to the timing and details of releasing this report, which they control," State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told BuzzFeed News in an email when asked about the report.
The State Department instituted a new system known as SMART — the State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset — in 2009 to aid foreign service officers and political appointees with logging what are called "record emails." In 2013, employees created 41,749 of these record emails — out of more than a billion emails sent.
The U.S. Embassy in Nigeria ranks at the top of the list of most emails logged, with nearly 5,000 saved into the SMART system in 2013. Many consulates and embassies input fewer than 10.
As the report notes, current State Department regulations stipulate that "if an employee puts down on paper or in electronic form information about 'the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government,' the information may be appropriate for preservation and therefore a record according to law, whether or not the author recognizes this fact."
Much of the disparity between emails sent and records created comes down to a lack of central oversight and unfamiliarity with the new system among staffers. More concerning, however, the report also found that some employees do not create record emails " because they do not want to make the email available in searches or fear that this availability would inhibit debate about pending decisions."
The report continues: "Many interviewees expressed a fear that if participants in such a debate knew that their opinions would be permanently recorded or accessible in searches, they would not express their opinions in an uninhibited manner. In some cases, an email containing a decision that ought to be preserved as a record was preceded by a chain of emails full of deliberative comments."