Over a five-year span, senior officials at the National Archives and
Records Administrations (NARA) voiced growing alarm about Hillary
Clinton’s record-keeping practices as secretary of state, according to
internal documents shared with 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-Ã -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 rely 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 notes show that the officials considered starting such procedures
with a test run at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement Affairs (INL), which was thought to be an “easy” venue for
such trials, then moving to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and
then “into the Office of the Secretary w/ Principles [sic]” on the “7
th Floor” – where the secretary’s office suite is housed.
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 s
ecured 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.
“As Paul surmised,” Stern wrote, Schmidt “has learned that when
Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she apparently used a personal
email account to conduct government business.” Stern, who has served as
general counsel at NARA since 1998, added: “NARA does look into
allegations of this type, with our interest being to ensure that the
agency recovers any alienated [withheld] records and has policies in
place to ensure prevent such events from occurring again. This case, if
true, would present a concern.”
Particularly stung by the
Times’ bombshell was James Springs, the acting inspector general at NARA, who responded to the story with an agitated
March 3 email
to Wester that asked: “Were we aware the gov[ernment] email system was
not being used by Ms[.] Clinton. [sic] If we were not aware why not.
[sic] What checks and balances do we have in place to ensure the gov
email systems are being used. [sic]”
Wester forwarded Springs’ email to seven NARA colleagues, stating
only: “I will talk to James, hopefully later this afternoon or
tomorrow.”
Wester did not respond to a message left on his office voice mail by
Fox News. Appearing at a National Press Club panel discussion in April,
Jason Baron, the attorney who formerly served as the director of
litigation at NARA, expressed amazement that NARA officials had not done
more to discharge their supervisory duty over Clinton’s recordkeeping
practices.
“I remain mystified by the fact that the use of a private e-mail
account apparently went either unnoticed or unremarked upon during the
four-year tenure in office of the former secretary,” said Baron, now in
private practice at the firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath.”Simply put,
where was everyone? Is there any record indicating that any lawyer, any
FOIA officer, any records person, any high-level official ever
respectfully confronted the former secretary with reasonable questions
about the practice of sending e-mails from a private account? It is
unfathomable to me that this would not have been noticed and reported up
the chain.”
Clinton has disclosed that late last year she turned over 55,000
pages of emails to the State Department, printed out, and unilaterally
deleted another 30,000 emails she deemed “personal.” Her spokesman, Nick
Merrill, told reporters when the controversy first erupted that the
secretary had obeyed the “letter and spirit of the rules.”
