CNN: Hillary Clinton's shrinking email defense

"While an FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server continues, the State Department's Office of Inspector General has raised the stakes with the release of a remarkable report finding that Clinton's actions violated State Department policies and were inconsistent with federal record-keeping laws.


The report also discloses new details relevant to Clinton's motives and her assertion that the use of a private server was simply a matter of convenience. While criminal charges still remain highly unlikely, the inspector general's report is significant and unquestionably damaging to Clinton's public defense.

Most crucially, the inspector general directly contradicts Clinton's repeated assertions that she complied both with federal law and State Department policies. "At a minimum," the report finds, "Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."

The report goes further, noting that while Clinton's subsequent production of 55,000 pages of emails in response to State Department demands partially corrected these violations, the records Clinton turned over were incomplete. Remarkably, the report includes reference to a previously unreleased 2010 email in which Clinton, responding to her deputy chief of staff for operations, Huma Abedin, directly addresses her lack of an official State Department email account and voices a fear of the "risk of the personal being accessible" if she had one. In a briefing, State Department officials were unable to confirm the source of this email, but if it was omitted from the records Clinton produced, it again would raise questions about the process she used to distinguish between "federal records" and "personal records" before destroying the latter."


http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/opinions/clinton-email-server-ig-report-opinion-cox/