Chaffetz: Clinton created 'mess'

Hearing on agency’s records shifts to candidate’s email server

Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., questions a witness Thursday during a House hearing on the State Department’s record-keeping.
Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., questions a witness Thursday during a House hearing on the State Department’s record-keeping.

WASHINGTON -- A House hearing Thursday on the State Department's record-keeping became an argument over Hillary Clinton's private email server, with Democrats accusing Republicans of using the forum to advance a partisan agenda and undermine her candidacy for president.



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Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, opened the hearing by condemning Clinton for intentionally making a "mess" of the system for archiving and retrieving documents at the State Department that has frustrated legitimate requests for information from Congress, the media and the public.

"Since 2009, there have been thousands of congressional inquiries, thousands of FOIA requests, subpoenas, [and] media inquiries," said Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "And if any of those required Secretary Clinton's federal records, i.e. her emails, there was not a way for those requests to be fulfilled."

Chaffetz noted, for example, that The Associated Press had to go to court to obtain all the detailed planning schedules from Clinton's four-year tenure as the nation's top diplomat.

Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, told the committee that the department is improving its records management but continues to struggle with the heavy volume of open-records requests it receives. To fulfill them, the State Department must dig through an ever-increasing quantity of records. An estimated 1 billion emails flow through the department's servers annually.

"We get very complex national security document requests," he said.

Kennedy said the department is sorting thousands of records it received from the FBI after its investigation of Clinton.

FBI Director James Comey in July announced the bureau's recommendation against criminal charges for Clinton and her aides after a yearlong investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information on the private email server she used.

Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the committee's top Democrat, argued that Clinton's actions were hardly unprecedented. Cummings underscored his argument by releasing a 2009 email exchange in which former Secretary of State Colin Powell advised Clinton on the use of personal email. The exchange occurred two days after Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state.

Powell wrote that he had "a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line ... so I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers."

He said he "even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts."

Powell also told Clinton "there is a real danger" if it becomes public the secretary of state is using a smartphone or mobile electronic device, because the information on the device could become an official record and subject to the law.

"Be very careful," he urged her, adding that he had skirted public-records laws "by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data."

Powell said in a statement Thursday that his email to Clinton wasn't an effort to influence her practices "but just to explain what I had done eight years earlier to begin the transformation of the State Department's information system."

Cummings said the email exchange, which he released Wednesday night, showed that Powell gave Clinton "a detailed blueprint on how to skirt security rules and bypass requirements to preserve federal records," although he said Clinton has made clear that she did not rely on his advice.

"If Republicans were truly concerned with transparency, strengthening FOIA, and preserving federal records, they would be attempting to recover Secretary Powell's emails from AOL, but they have taken no steps to do so despite the fact that this period -- including the run-up to the Iraq War -- was critical to our nation's history," Cummings said.

Powell's personal email service was provided by AOL, which is now owned by Verizon Communications Inc.

Kennedy testified Thursday that the department had sought Powell's emails but couldn't secure them without his assent.

"We cannot make a request for someone else's records from their provider," Kennedy said. "We ask that Secretary Powell contact AOL."

Republicans rejected the comparison with Powell, saying Clinton told the FBI during its investigation that his advice had no bearing on her decision to use a private server.

"It was a very conscious choice," Chaffetz said of Clinton's decision to rely on her own server.

The State Department agreed last week to turn over all the detailed planning schedules from Clinton's time as secretary of state by mid-October. The decision came more than a year after AP sued the State Department in federal court to obtain the material. The news agency filed Freedom of Information Act requests in 2010 and 2013 for the records.

Chaffetz said he was stunned that it would be so difficult to obtain what seemed to be relatively benign records.

Kennedy described the information requests for the planning schedules as part of "a larger swath of six requests that we were engaged in" for the material, further stressing an already under-resourced system.

"That's why we are being sued," Kennedy said. "There are true resource and time and other issues that have to be dealt with here."

Information for this article was contributed by Richard Lardner of The Associated Press; and by Jennifer Epstein, Ben Brody and Billy House of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 09/09/2016

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