State Dept. Contradicts Hillary Clinton’s Claims About Automatic Archiving

AP Photo/Seth Wenig
AP Photo/Seth Wenig

The latest Hillary Mail bombshell is that her claim of automatic archiving was false, and she almost certainly knew it was false. Here’s Hillary from her press conference this week:

And when I got there, I wanted to just use one device for both personal and work e-mails, instead of two. It was allowed. And as I said, it was for convenience. And it was my practice to communicate with State Department and other government officials on their .gov accounts so those e-mails would be automatically saved in the State Department system to meet record-keeping requirements, and that, indeed, is what happened.

No, indeed, it was not, as the State Department admitted today. From Politico:

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters Friday that archiving of the work email boxes of senior State Department officials besides the secretary did not begin until “February of this year.” She previously said Secretary of State John Kerry uses an official account and his emails have been archived since soon after he succeeded Clinton.

Psaki said the automatic archiving began last month for “dozens” of top officials — such as the deputy secretary, under secretaries and assistant secretaries. “Our goal is to apply this to all employee mailboxes by the end of 2016,” she said.

They started archiving last month – which is right about the time Hillary’s mail scandal began rumbling to the surface, thanks to the House Select Committee on Benghazi – and they’re still not doing it for everyone, but Clinton breezily assured the nation that she didn’t have to comply with federal records laws because everything she sent to everybody with a .gov address was being automatically saved somewhere.

Psaki tried to throw a bit of shade Clinton’s way, while continuing the Obama Administration’s tack away from her sinking ship:

Later in the briefing, however, Psaki suggested that there was confusion among some State Department employees about what was and was not being automatically saved.

“I assume some assumed that was happening at the time as well,” Psaki said. “We’re updating it because it’s an imperfect system.”

Speaking without reference to Clinton, Psaki said the duty was on individual employees to save records that met standards for permanent archiving. “Clearly, individuals — any top officials — would also be expected to preserve their documents,” she said.

Keep in mind this is the Secretary of State we’re talking about, and we know she set up her utterly unique universal personal system over the objections of State Department IT officials, who also rebuked a stream of requests from Clinton to use her preferred mobile email device. In all that time, nobody ever thought to establish whether her emails to officials with proper government addresses were being automatically saved? Sorry, kids, that doesn’t pass the laugh test.

It’s also another cosmic example of sheer irresponsibility from someone who wants to run for President. Or will the Clintonoids fall back to their earlier spin about how she’s a confused old lady who doesn’t know the first thing about computers?

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