The U.S. State Department has failed in its ability to handle Freedom of Information Act requests, a report released by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) on Thursday has claimed.
The report said the State Department gave an "inaccurate and incomplete" reply when asked two years ago about Hillary Clinton's email accounts, the Washington Post reports. At that time, officials told Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics they had no information or documentation of the former Secretary's email accounts aside from her official, government one.
Further, the report indicates that providing faulty responses to requests made while Clinton was in office was in fact a long-standing problem.
"The searches performed by S/ES do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness," the Evaluation of the Department of State's FOIA Processes for Requests Involving the Office of the Secretary report said.
The report claims that people have waited more than 500 days for a reply from the secretary's office when they were seeking records, the Washington Post reports. The office has also been accused of having no written procedure for handling such requests and there has been no senior official in charge of dealing with the requests.
The report also indicates that dozens of senior government officials would send Clinton business emails to her private account, Newsweek reports.
In fact, Clinton and her staff would send classified information over the server, according to The Federalist. They also claim that nearly 1,300 emails contained this classified information.
Even more concerning to some has been the report's claim that "officials in IPS and attorneys for the Department identified instances in which S/ES reported that records did not exist, even though it was later revealed that such records did exist." The report also said that Staff in the Office of the Secretary had not accessed proper training to understand their FOIA duties.
State Department Inspector General Steve Linick has indicated an additional report he has been planning could look at Clinton's use of personal email and how that affected the Department's ability to conserve records, according to the Washington Post.
Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said, "The Department had a preexisting process in place to handle the tens of thousands of requests it received annually, and that established process was followed by the Secretary and her staff throughout her tenure."
The State Department choose to release 2,900 pages of Clinton's emails on the same day the report was released, The Hill reports. The Department has been ordered to release 55,000 pages by the end of January.
