A years-long vacancy in the State Department’s Office of inspector general allowed Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account and server to hide her public records to continue unchecked, experts told a Senate committee Wednesday.
Daniel Epstein, president of nonpartisan watchdog Cause of Action, pointed to another empty inspector general office — this one in the National Archives and Records Administration — as a potential cause of the breakdown in transparency that occurred during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department.
James Springs, who now serves as the National Archives’ permanent inspector general, oversaw the agency in an interim capacity from September 2012 until March of this year.
That means the watchdog position was effectively empty as Clinton made her transition out of the State Department.
Top Archives officials were concerned at the time that Clinton might attempt to leave the State Department with her records and bring them to the Clinton Library in Arkansas, internal emails obtained by Cause of Action show.
Paul Wester, the Archives’ chief records officer, said in a December 2012 email to his colleagues that they needed to “discuss what we know” about the State Department’s handling of Clinton records and map out a way to “delicately go about learning more.”
Epstein told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that the National Archives, under Springs’ oversight, “either was aware of the failure to preserve Mrs. Clinton’s emails or was extremely negligent in its efforts to monitor senior officials’ emails.”
He cited an email from a top State Department records official to Wester and others at the National Archives that sought their opinions on whether a draft version of State’s email policy broke existing laws.
“I want to ensure that whatever we say is consistent with law and regulation,” said William Fischer, the State Department records official, in the October 2014 email.
Fischer’s message suggested Wester, Springs and their colleagues at the National Archives “had reason to know that the State Department was seeking legal justification for noncompliance with applicable regulations relating to email records,” Epstein said.
What’s more, transparency appeared to suffer at the State Department under another temporary inspector general.
Harold Geisel served as the agency’s interim watchdog while Clinton was secretary of state. Geisel had been named an ambassador by then-President Bill Clinton and donated to President Obama’s first presidential campaign, records show.
The Government Accountability Office raised concerns in April 2011 that Geisel’s career membership in the Foreign Service “resulted in, at a minimum, the appearance of independence impairment.” Yet Geisel continued to serve as acting inspector general until shortly after Clinton left office, when Obama named Steven Linnick to the permanent position.
“The evidence obtained by Cause of Action indicates that the time, effort and resources now being utilized to uncover the lack of transparency created by the failure to secure then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails may have been solved with permanent and independent IGs (both at the State Department and more recently at NARA),” Epstein testified Wednesday.
