Inspector General Report on Secretary Clinton's Nongovernment Server and Email Arrangement

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, the State Department inspector general has released findings regarding the State Department's email practices for the last five Secretaries of State. This report makes clear that Secretary Clinton has not told the truth to the American people about her nongovernment server and email arrangement.

As I have noted many times before, Secretary Clinton's nongovernment server arrangement prevented the State Department from complying with the Freedom of Information Act. She used the private server to avoid the law that requires archiving Federal records. It was designed to wall her email off from the normal treatment of a government official's email communications.

The inspector general found that Secretary Clinton failed to surrender all official emails to the Department prior to leaving government service.

The inspector general found that Secretary Clinton's email practices ``did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.'' In other words, she violated the law. The inspector general has made clear that Secretary Clinton neither sought nor received any permission to maintain her nongovernment server arrangement. Moreover, the report says that if she had, that permission would have been denied.

These findings directly conflict with her many misleading public statements.

Secretary Clinton said on July 7, 2015, ``Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.''

That statement is false.

Her staff also failed to comply with Department policy and records laws. They routinely conducted State Department business on personal email accounts.

After the controversy broke, they eventually turned over 72,000 pages of work related emails from those private accounts. These emails were not preserved in Department recordkeeping systems as required by Department policies and Federal records laws. In other words, her staff also violated the law.

Documents in those 72,000 pages were systematically withheld from Freedom of Information Act requestors and congressional oversight committees, including the Senate Judiciary Committee, which I chair. Based on the inspector general report, it appears that the Department failed to produce key documents to Congress from these personal email accounts.

For example, according to emails cited by the inspector general, we learned that Secretary Clinton's nongovernment server was attacked by hackers. One email the Department failed to turn over said that ``we were attacked again so I shut the server down for a few minutes.''

It is disturbing that the State Department knew it had emails like this and turned them over to the inspector general but not to Congress.

In another email the Department failed to turn over, the director of Secretary Clinton's IT unit warned her that ``you should be aware that any email would go through the Department's infrastructure and subject to FOIA searches.'' Clearly, Secretary Clinton wanted to avoid the Freedom of Information Act at all costs.

That IT director who warned her about the transparency laws for State Department emails is named John Bentel. He has since retired from the State Department, and thus, the inspector general could not require him to testify.

He refused to speak with the inspector general. In fact, Former Secretary Clinton and several of her aides also refused to speak to the inspector general. Mr. Bentel also refused to speak with the Judiciary Committee. According to his attorney, Randall Turk, Mr. Bentel knew nothing about the server at the time. In refusing to participate in a voluntary witness interview with the committee, Mr. Bentel's attorney claimed that his client only learned of the controversial email arrangement after it was reported in the press.

He said another congressional committee ``spent its entire interview . . . focusing on what the Committees' letter says you want to ask him about.''

In a January 14, 2016, email to my staff, Mr. Turk noted that Mr. Bentel had ``no memory or knowledge of the matters he was questioned about.''

The inspector general report says otherwise. According to the report, two of Mr. Bentel's subordinates separately raised concerns back in 2010 about Secretary Clinton's private email usage, including concerns that it was interfering with Federal recordkeeping laws. That is 5 years before the news broke publicly.

Both of these State Department staff independently told the inspector general about similar conversations they had with Mr. Bentel about their concerns. According to these new witnesses, Mr. Bentel told them never to speak of Secretary Clinton's personal email system again.

It seems unlikely that two witnesses who told such similar stories independent of one another would be making it up. Plus, they knew they were under a legal obligation to tell the truth to the inspector general.

Without having spoken to these witnesses directly, the circumstances make their statement seem credible. And although Mr. Bentel has been given the opportunity to provide his side of the story, he has refused to cooperate.

But if what these two witnesses said is true, it is an outrage, and it raises lots of serious questions. Good and honest employees just trying to do their job were told to shut up and sit down. Concerns about the Secretary's email system being out of compliance with Federal recordkeeping laws were swept under the rug.

If those State Department employees had not been muzzled 5 years earlier, perhaps Secretary Clinton could have avoided this entire controversy.

Are these statements evidence of an intent to cover up Federal Records Act violations? Were the representations to the committee by Mr. Bentel's attorney that he didn't know about the private server false?

It seems from the inspector general report that Mr. Bentel in fact did have knowledge of Secretary Clinton's email arrangement, contrary to his attorney's assertions.

Not only that, he also was reportedly warned that it raised legal concerns about compliance with Federal records laws.

Secretary Clinton and her associates have refused to cooperate with the inquiries into this controversy. But it is becoming more apparent why she is not. The inspector general report makes clear that Secretary Clinton and a number of other former Department officials have not been truthful with the American people.

And in pursuit of constitutional oversight on these very important issues, the Department of State is continuing to fail to provide relevant documents to Congress.

I will follow up to get to the bottom of these discrepancies because misrepresenting the facts to Congress is unacceptable. Simply said, the American people deserve better.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source