Posted on 04/29/2015 1:03:46 PM PDT by markomalley
When State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that the emails of senior officials at Foggy Bottom weren’t automatically archived until “February of this year,” it raised the question of why Hillary Clinton had claimed that her emails to colleagues were automatically saved.
“What was her foundation for even that? Did someone incorrectly tell her that that was happening, or did she incorrectly make such a self-serving assumption?” former Justice Department Office of Information and Privacy director Dan Metcalfe wondered to Politico.
Cause of Action (CoA), a government transparency group, thinks it has the answer. “[The State Department] just provided Cause of Action documents showing that the department has required emails to be preserved since 2009,” Dan Epstein, the group’s executive director, says in a written statement to National Review.
The documents Epstein references, which were released to Cause of Action by Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, provide guidance on the State Department’s record-keeping policy.
“As a supplement to existing policy, and consistent with the policy in place since 2009, it is important to capture electronically the email accounts of the [State Department’s] senior officials,” says one memo dated August 28, 2014.
“The State Department should have had possession of Secretary Clinton’s email records when Mrs. Clinton left office,” Epstein says. “The fact that they did not have possession of her emails raises still pressing questions.”
Another official at the organization suggests a second possibility: that the State Department actually does have more emails than previously acknowledged.
“All of those emails that she sent to people, we should be able to retrieve,” the CoA official says.
NR asked the State Department about what the CoA official calls an “apparent contradiction” between the August 28 memo and Psaki’s statement, but didn’t get an immediate answer. NR will update this story if and when the State Department responds.
“What was her foundation for even that?”
DOH!
Don’t say “FOUNDATION”!
Retaining Senior Officials = Reeducation Camp
“All of those emails that she sent to people, we should be able to retrieve,”
Boy Trey Gowdy sure is going to be busy trying to BURY AND HIDE all those emails before the scheduled hearing in 3 weeks.
What is this “appears” stuff? We have several hundreds of thousands of employees in these agencies who are paid roughly twice what their private sector counterparts are paid and have “can’t-be-fired” status as well as taxpayer funded pensions. It’s too much, I guess, to ask them to follow some sort of rulebook.
How was Hillary to know that? She didn’t have a State Dept. email account so how could they get in touch with her?
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