John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said in a memo to top supporters Monday that the former secretary of state would have addressed concerns about her private email use if she had been aware of them during her tenure.
The memo, which was first obtained by Buzzfeed, dismissed problems highlighted last week by the State Department inspector general in a scathing report about the agency’s record-keeping practices.
“What she thought would be a convenient way to communicate with family, friends and colleagues — by using one email account for both her work related and personal emails — has turned out to be anything but convenient,” Podesta wrote in the memo. “If she could go back, she’d do it differently.”
“Had Secretary Clinton known of any concerns about her email setup at the time, she would have taken steps to address them,” he added. “She believed she was following the practices of other secretaries and senior officials.”
In its report, the State Department inspector general said top agency officials were not aware of Clinton’s private server and would not have approved such an arrangement had they known of it at the time.
The report also cited two 2010 meetings in which agency staff members raised questions about the security of Clinton’s server and were told “the matter was not to be discussed any further.”
Podesta repeated Clinton’s argument that previous secretaries of state had relied on personal email accounts, although the inspector general drew several key distinctions between Clinton’s email use and that of her predecesors.
“While we understand the questions about Secretary Clinton’s email practices, we are confident that voters will look at the full picture of everything she has done throughout her career,” Podesta said.
