An ambassador who was ousted from his position in part for using private email sent top State Department officials classified information a year before his removal.
Scott Gration, the former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, sent Hillary Clinton’s staff an “update on trilateral talks” in Sept. 2011 that is mostly redacted and marked classified, emails released Wednesday by the State Department show.
Gration appeared to reference officials from the governments of Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan in the first part of his email. The lengthy memo was forwarded to Clinton by Jake Sullivan, her former director of policy planning.
Clinton responded that she was “willing to make the calls [Gration] requested.”
Gration was pushed from his post in 2012 after setting up an unsecured email system in the bathroom of his embassy office.
His address in the memo to Sullivan was redacted. But if, as the State Department’s inspector general found in Aug. 2012, Gration had sent the official record using his personal account, Clinton and the agency’s top brass would have been aware of his private email use a year before the scathing watchdog report that prompted his removal.
Despite the inspector general’s findings that Gration violated agency policy, Clinton has defended her own private email use by insisting it was technically allowed by the State Department.
