WASHINGTON (AP) – The State Department’s internal watchdog has found that many department employees are not preserving emails for the public record as required by the government. That could mean a substantial amount of lost government information.
The inspector general’s office, in a report out Wednesday, said that in 2011, when Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state, department employees wrote more than 1 billion emails but only marked 61,156 for the public record. There’s no way to know from the figures how many should have been designated as public records. Even fewer were marked for public records, 41,749, in 2013, the year when she left the department.
Clinton is under scrutiny for using her personal email exclusively for official non-classified business during her tenure and for doing so with a private server. The new report does not address the use of personal email accounts, which the department discouraged employees from using in earlier guidance.
But the investigation found that employees had no central oversight of their record-keeping responsibilities with email, many did not know about the rules and some feared the consequences of their emails being searched and exposed.
“Department officials have noted that many emails that qualify as records are not being saved as record emails,” the report says. “Some employees were under the impression that record emails were only a convenience; they had not understood that some emails were required to be saved as records.”