A top Republican senator asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for information about the State Department’s administrative review of the handling of classified information on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
Back in October, the agency identified almost 600 security violations in its review of 33,000 email records of former agency officials and aides to Clinton. Ninety-one “valid violations” were attributable to 38 different people. An additional 497 violations could not be connected to any one person.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Pompeo on Wednesday with several information requests. It noted the State Department’s report “states that ‘the unprecedented nature and scale of this event posed many significant challenges’ for the Department’s investigation.”
He added, “These challenges included a four-month pause requested by the FBI and a ‘significant break in time (five to nine years) between when the incidents occurred and when they were reviewed.’ That meant, among other things, that ‘many of the individuals [were] unavailable to be interviewed at all, as they have moved on from the Department and could not be reached.'”
The State Department review began after the FBI investigated Clinton’s use of an unauthorized server hosted in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York, during her time as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Clinton insists the email setup was simply a matter of “convenience.”
The security violations with the handling of classified information, Johnson said, were so pervasive in the State Department under Clinton that many individuals would have to be prosecuted in order to have a semblance of accountability.
“It is unfortunate that the Department was unable to interview all the individuals needed to assess the extent to which Department employees mishandled classified information. Interestingly, a prosecutor who worked on the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s private email server told the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, ‘the problem was the State Department was so screwed up in the way they treated classified information that if you wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton, you would have had to prosecute 150 State Department people.’ The seemingly widespread and pervasive nature of these security violations, especially for the handling of classified information, is simply unacceptable,” he wrote.
Johnson called on Pompeo to provide further information to his committee, including the names and titles of the “dozens of past and present [Department] employees and senior officials” who were contacted for the review as well as the names of the 38 people who committed a valid security violation and whether they continue to work at the department.
Additionally, Johnson pressed Pompeo to disclose whether the 38 officials tied to “valid violations” were interviewed by the State Department for the report. He requested information concerning which of the 91 violations were attributed to each of them and whether disciplinary action was taken in any instance.
Johnson also inquired about whether Clinton, her former counsel Cheryl Mills, her former aide Huma Abedin, her former counsel Heather Samuelson, or her former aide Jake Sullivan were involved in any of the 497 security violations cited in the review. Mills and Samuelson were granted immunity deals by the FBI during the agency’s investigation into Clinton’s use of the unauthorized server.
“After the discovery of the private email server, did the Department send instructions to former-Secretary Clinton or her staff with respect to the transmission of classified materials? If so, what were those instructions, who transmitted them, and when were they sent?” Johnson asked, adding when the Department first became aware that Clinton exclusively emailed from a private server and who at the Department was notified.
The chairman gave Pompeo a deadline to provide the information no later than Feb. 20.
