A State Department audit has found presidential candidate Hillary Clinton guilty of breaking federal rules with her private email server, a report said on May 25.
The agency also faulted previous secretaries of state for poorly managing email and other computer data and slowly responding to new cybersecurity flaws. However, Clinton’s failures were seen as the most serious.
The 78-page report by the State Department’s Inspector General cited “longstanding, systemic weaknesses” related to communications.
The review says the agency and its secretaries were “slow to recognize and to manage effectively the legal requirements and cybersecurity risks associated with electronic data communications, particularly as those risks pertain to its most senior leadership.”
The report comes after it was revealed that Clinton exclusively used a private email account and server during her time as secretary of state.
“Therefore, Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” the report states, according to Politico, which obtained a copy.
“At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act,” the review said.
The report was based on interviews with current Secretary of State John Kerry and former secretaries, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.
The report states Clinton and her deputies declined the inspector general’s requests for interviews.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s allies defend her saying she has done nothing illegal, and that she was not trying to avoid public records requests.
The State Department released about 30,000 emails Clinton handed over to the agency at its request in December 2014.
Although there are no controversies in the messages, more than 2,000 emails on her server were signaled as classified.
The presidential candidate has also faced criticism after ordering her staff to delete an estimated 32,000 messages that were regarded as personal.
Clinton’s server was handed over to officials last year. The number of emails the FBI recovered from it is unknown.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
