Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday he would not allow his State Department staff to use a private email server for their official communications.
Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry was forced to defend his handling of the controversy over his predecessor Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a personal server to shield her work-related emails.
“We have very specific procedures in place in the department,” Kerry said when pressed on whether he would allow his officials to use private emails. “I brought in an inspector general. I wrote a letter to the inspector general asking him to review our entire process, and so in today’s world, given all that we have learned and what we understand about the fragility … vulnerability of our system, we don’t do that. No.”
Kerry said earlier in the same hearing that the burden of sorting Clinton’s emails for release under the Freedom of Information Act has sapped agency resources, although he would not specify the costs associated with the process.
The State Department has released roughly 43,000 of the 55,000 pages Clinton turned over to the agency in December of 2014, and is slated to complete the publication of the emails by the end of the month.
More than 1,700 of the emails have been upgraded to classified, including at least 22 that were deemed “top secret” and withheld in full.
