Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley is pressing the Department of State Inspector General to open a new investigation of the use of a private email account and server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and members of her inner circle of advisers, particularly that of Huma Abedin.
Grassley is concerned that the private email allowed Clinton, Abedin and other high-ranking State Department officials to conduct official business without archiving them for government record-keeping purposes as required by federal laws and regulations.
Abedin received a rare designation of Special Government Employee that allowed her to draw her official salary as well as compensation from a private consulting firm with close links to President Clinton and the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
In a March 19 letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Grassley said “a number of conflict of interest concerns arise when a government employee is simultaneously being paid by a private company, especially when that company, Teneo, ‘brings together the disciplines of government and public affairs.'”
The private email use means “these concerns are heightened when high level employees, such as Ms. Abedin, may have used non-government email accounts to engage in both government and private business. Furthermore, Ms. Abedin and other State Department employees appear to have been improperly categorized as SGEs.”
Grassley requested multiple documents from the State Department about Abedin situation in June and August of 2013, but has characterized the material provided as “unresponsive.”
Teneo was founded by Douglas Band, who worked for President Clinton in the White House and for a decade thereafter as his special adviser, a position that afforded him great influence on the former chief executive and his wife, and unusually close access to foreign heads of state and corporate leaders. Teneo is a “political intelligence and corporate advisory firm,” according to Grassley.
President Clinton was a partner in the firm after June 2011 when the State Department approved the relationship. It had been reviewed to determine whether it posed a conflict of interest for Mrs. Clinton as the nation’s chief diplomat. The former president withdrew from the firm eight months later.
The firm was also linked as a consultant to the Clinton foundation and Brand was instrumental in forming the Clinton Global Initiative, which is associated with the charitable organization.
Grassley is also worried about the impact of Clinton’s private email on the credibility of the Freedom of Information Act, which requires government documents, including emails and text messages, be made publicly available, subject only to lawful exemptions such as national security and privacy. The judiciary panel has Senate oversight jurisdiction for the FOIA.
Douglas Welty, spokesman for State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, declined to say if a new investigation has or will be opened but he acknowledged that “we will be responding to congressional inquiries, announcing our intentions.”
The urgency of Grassley’s request was heightened earlier this month when an inspector general report on the State Department’s main archiving system was made public amid the growing controversy about the Clinton private email and server use.
Welty said that review had been initiated in 2013 and was completed in January 2015. A sentence in the report said “department officials have noted that many emails that qualify as records are not being saved as record emails.”
Footnote 11 of the report was appended to that sentence, cautioning that “these assessments do not apply to the system used by the department’s high-level principals, the Secretary, the deputy secretaries, the under secretaries, and their immediate staffs, which maintain separate systems.”
Welty declined to elaborate on the implications of either the sentence or the footnote, saying “when new information like this is discovered during the course of an inspection, we don’t necessarily expand the scope of that inspection. Under such circumstances, we may plan additional work to analyze the new information.”
Footnote 11’s reference to “separate systems” may cast doubt on the veracity of Clinton’s claim in a March 10, 2015, news conference at the UN that she used the private account for her own “convenience.”
If, on the other hand, the “separate systems” reference meant the inspector general believed Clinton and her top aides were using email accounts captured in some way by other official systems, it could bolster her claim that she complied with all of the relevant laws and regulations.
The March 2015 report said the department’s main system for preserving official emails had captured only seven emails created by the secretary’s office. A similar paucity of preserved official emails was reported among other key department offices, including five for legislative affairs, 28 for the legal adviser and 29 by the public affairs office.
To put those figures in context, the inspector general said State Department employees generated more than 1 billion official emails and preserved only 41,179 in 2013. The figure for the inspector general’s office was 774.
Hillary Clinton is the presumptive favorite to win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination but her prospects may have been damaged by the controversy over her private email use while serving as secretary of state, and growing questions about conflicts of interest between her official duties during her four-year tenure there.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
