Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a secret email to conduct official business broke a number of department policies, an inspector general concluded in a report sent to Capitol Hill Wednesday that also suggests she used the account to try to hide her communications from the public.
The 83-page report, obtained by The Washington Times, is devastating in its evaluation of Mrs. Clinton’s behavior, saying it can find no record of her getting approval from either security or legal staffers for her unique arrangement. The report also undercuts many of her campaign’s explanations for her use of the system, dismisses comparisons to her predecessors’ email use, and points to repeated hacking attempts that she failed to report.
After one of the 2011 hack attempts Mrs. Clinton’s tech staffer shut the server down for a few minutes, hoping that would solve the situation, but quickly warned top aides not to send Mrs. Clinton “anything sensitive” after the attempted breach, according to the report, which was obtained by The Washington Times.
After another suspicious attempt Mrs. Clinton said she was scared to open email — but failed to report the matter.
“Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information,” the investigators said. “However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her staff reported these incidents to computer security personnel or anyone else within the Department.”
At one point in 2010, Mrs. Clinton’s emails were ending up in subordinates’ spam filters because they were coming from a non-state.gov account. One of her top aides urged her to sign up for an official account or letting everyone in the department know of her address so she could be added as a verified account, but she refused, saying she didn’t “want any risk of the personal being accessible.” More at Source
