Read the full story: Daily Caller

A memo sent to State Department officials last year indicates that the agency had a policy in place as early as 2009 requiring out-going officials to turn over email records when they leave office.

 

Hillary Clinton flouted that policy when she left her position as secretary of state in February 2013. Clinton exclusively used a personal email account hosted on a private server during her time at the agency and only turned those records over a few months ago.

 

“As a supplement to existing policy, and consistent with the policy in place since 2009, it is important to capture electronically the e-mail accounts of the senior officials…as they depart their positions,” reads an Aug. 28, 2014, memo entitled “Senior Officials’ Records Management Responsibilities” sent by Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of management.

 

Clinton held on to her emails until Dec. 2014, nearly two years after leaving her position. When she did finally turn the records over, she did so only at the State Department’s request and as a House committee investigating Benghazi sought them.

 

Cause of Action, a nonprofit government watchdog group, pointed out the Kennedy memo, which was included in a list of documents it received in response to a March 17 letter calling on the State Department to investigate whether Clinton turned over all official government emails sent to and from her personal account.

Read the full story: National Review

When State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that the emails of senior officials at Foggy Bottom weren’t automatically archived until “February of this year,” it raised the question of why Hillary Clinton had claimed that her emails to colleagues were automatically saved.

“What was her foundation for even that? Did someone incorrectly tell her that that was happening, or did she incorrectly make such a self-serving assumption?” former Justice Department Office of Information and Privacy director Dan Metcalfe wondered to Politico.

Cause of Action (CoA), a government transparency group, thinks it has the answer. “[The State Department] just provided Cause of Action documents showing that the department has required emails to be preserved since 2009,” Dan Epstein, the group’s executive director, says in a written statement to National Review.

The documents Epstein references, which were released to Cause of Action by Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, provide guidance on the State Department’s record-keeping policy.