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June 03, 2015
Feds alarmed over Hillary's record keeping for 5 years
Federal officials voiced growing alarm over Clinton’s compliance with records laws, documents show
OVER A 5-YEAR SPAN, senior officials at the National Archives and Records Administration voiced growing alarm about Hillary Clinton's record keeping practices as secretary of state, according to internal documents obtained by Fox News.
During Clinton’s final days in office, Paul Wester, the director of Modern Records Programs at NARA – essentially the agency’s chief records custodian – privately emailed five NARA colleagues to confide his fear that Clinton would take her official records with her when she left office, in violation of federal statutes.
Referring to a colleague whose full name is unknown, Wester wrote on December 11, 2012: “Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans afoot for taking her records from State to Little Rock." That was a reference to the possibility that Clinton might seek to house her records at the Clinton Presidential Center, which was largely funded by the Clinton Foundation.
"[W]e need to discuss what we know, and how we should delicately go about learning more about…the transition plans for Secretary Clinton’s departure from State," Wester added. He did not specify why the situation required “delicate” handling, but added that colleagues had “continued to invoke the specter of the Henry Kissinger experience vis-à-vis Hilary [sic] Clinton.”
That was a reference to how the secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations, preparing to leave office in January 1977, stashed large segments of his classified papers on the upstate New York estate of his friend, Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller. It wasn’t until 2001 that Kissinger relented to demands from scholars and the U.S. government and made the documents available for research.
Under the Federal Records Act, NARA is entrusted with official oversight of Executive Branch agencies and their employees, aimed at ensuring that the records they generate in the discharge of their official duties are being properly preserved and stored.
The Wester email and 72 other internal documents released by NARA and the State Department earlier this month show NARA officers repeatedly expressed concerns that Clinton and her office were not observing the federal laws and regulations that govern recordkeeping – but that NARA never did much about it.
The 73 documents from NARA and State were turned over to Cause of Action, a non-partisan government accountability watchdog that had filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March, after the New York Times revealed that Clinton had exclusively used a private email server and domain name during her tenure as secretary of state. Cause of Action shared the documentswith Fox News on an exclusive basis, ahead of Senate testimony by the group’s executive director, Daniel Epstein.
“Given NARA’s stated concerns,” Epstein said in written testimony submitted this week to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, “it either was aware of the failure to preserve Mrs. Clinton’s emails or was extremely negligent in its efforts to monitor [the preservation of] senior officials’ emails.”
The alarm bells sounded fairly early in Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom. In a November 2009 email, written when Clinton had not yet completed her first year on the job, NARA archivist David Langbart wrote to his colleague, Michael Kurtz, about a “huge issue on which there has been little progress” – namely, the proper preservation of “high-level memos” generated by employees at “S/ES.” That is the abbreviation for the office of the secretary of state within the State Department’s Executive Secretariat.
“[Members of a task force] are still working with the Executive Secretariat on the high-level memos issue,” Langbart wrote on November 2. “Earlier it sounded like S/ES was going to relay on SMART [an updated recordkeeping program for the State Department] but it now appears that they will be establishing their own recordkeeping system…”
Previously unpublished notes taken at a conference of NARA and State Department officials in July 2014, after Clinton had left the government, reflect continued concern that recordkeeping practices at Clinton’s agency had never met federal standards.
The handwritten notes, turned over to Cause of Action, refer to employees at State “using gmail with no r/k [recordkeeping] system,” and lamenting the “total disaster” that had apparently occurred when the Department of Interior had adopted a Google app for government use. The notes show the officials discussed “targeting senior leaders” at the State Department, in part by having assistant secretaries of state at each of the department’s bureaus establish “Bureau Records coordinators.”
The most recent private expressions of concern by NARA officials came after Michael Schmidt, the New York Times reporter who broke the Clinton private emails story on March 2, began making inquiries at NARA a few days before his story ran. “I’m working on a story about government employees who use their personal email addresses to conduct government business,” Schmidt wrote, without disclosing initially that his focus was on Clinton, in a February 27 email to NARA general counsel Gary Stern.
Within about two hours, Stern secured approval from NARA Chief Operating Officer William Bosanko (“No objections from me”) for Stern to speak with Schmidt. The two connected on Sunday, March 1, after which Stern privately emailed the National Archivist himself, David Ferriero, and Wester, the agency’s chief records custodian, who had two years earlier expressed fears about Clinton unlawfully taking her records with her when she left office.
Wild Thing's comment........
Just like all the gates when Bill Clinton was president. Corruption and lies are a part of the DNA of the Clinton's. Laws and rules mean nothing to them except something to break and not follow.
Posted by Wild Thing at June 3, 2015 12:45 AM
Comments
If Bill and Hillary had an Italian last name, they would be arrested for racketeering and money laundering.
Posted by: BobF at June 3, 2015 09:38 AM
