The State Department insisted on Wednesday that it’s not trying to “spin” an inspector general report that said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton violated records policy by using a private email system, even though officials told reporters on background that the report simply says the State Department “didn’t do a great job.”
State Department officials held the background call with some reporters earlier Wednesday, and reporters who participated in it asked about it in the public briefing with spokesman Mark Toner.
One reporter said officials said repeatedly on background that the report said “we didn’t do a great job” when it came to Clinton’s email system. But the report said that phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in the inspector general report.
Instead, that report said the department was “slow to recognize” and manage legal requirements and cybersecurity risks related to how emails are kept, and also cited “management weaknesses” that led many emails to be lost.
When asked if the background briefers were accurate to say the report said the department “didn’t go a great job,” Toner refused to answer.
“I’m not going to parse the expression he used to acknowledge the fact that we, like many federal agencies, were not doing enough to meet the requirements of records management preservation,” he said.
Toner also rejected the argument that the department was trying to use a cloak of anonymity to spin the press.
“With all due respect … the ‘cloak of anonymity,’ it was a background briefing that we set up, which is a common practice,” he said. “All of you know in this room, we do background briefings all the time” to add “more depth and context” than might usually be added.
“There’s not any effort to spin this, there’s not any effort to hide or obfuscate about what the information is,” Toner added. “But I will also acknowledge that one of the reasons we did this on background, acknowledging the fact that others who are privy to this report before it was publicly released chose to leak it to members of the media.”
