State Department records indicate Hillary Clinton received just one briefing on handling classified material during her entire tenure as secretary of state, rather than the standard of one annually, according to a new report.
Her sole briefing took place Jan. 22, 2009, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller through a records request of the State Department. She had been confirmed by the Senate one day earlier.
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“It is certainly inconsistent with practices as I have known it for cabinet members,” a former senior State Department official told The Daily Caller. “If there is only one instance of her being briefed and nothing for the next four years, then I would consider that to be a lapse in security protocol, even at that level.
“Someone was responsible for making sure that she was compliant with the various rules and regulations,” he added. “And if there’s no record of that, that probably means it didn’t happen.
“I suppose it’s possible that that information is sitting in a file that just hasn’t been searched. I know having done lots of FOIA and other kinds of congressional document requests over the course of my time there. But if there’s no such document, that constitutes a lapse.”
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The FBI is conducting a probe of Clinton’s private email server, and the State Department in February finished a release of more than 30,000 emails that Clinton improperly processed through her homebrew server. A similar release of emails from Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, is set to begin in coming weeks.
Experts have suggested that a culture of mishandling information grew at the department during Clinton’s time at the helm, from 2009-13.
“You set standards from the top,” the former official said. “So if you show that even the secretary is taking the security rules and regulations and procedures very seriously and doing everything in their power to abide by them in the appropriate way, that sends a signal to everybody else that they have to treat it the same way.
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“But once you start down the road that, well, ‘I’m special and this is inconvenient,’ that sends a different signal to the workforce,” he added.
