Emails reveal that senior officials at NARA expressed concern privately that Mrs. Clinton would attempt to conceal her records
WASHINGTON – In December 2012, NARA Chief Records Officer Paul Wester notified several other National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) employees that NARA COO Tom Mills and NARA’s Director of the Federal Records Center Jay Trainer were concerned that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would take her records with her to the Clinton Library upon her departure from the State Department.
The information is contained in new documents that Cause of Action, a nonpartisan government transparency organization, has obtained via a series of public records requests to both NARA and the State Department.
Click here and here to view the documents
In one email, Wester stated, “Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans afoot for taking her [Mrs. Clinton’s] records from State to Little Rock.”
Wester said NARA needed “to make sure everyone leaving the Administration does not leave with Federal records,” adding that NARA was “aware of the issue and are working on it.”
Wester said Mills and Trainer “continued to invoke the specter of the Henry Kissinger experience vis-à-vis Hillary Clinton.” This is a reference to the long and litigious battle over former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s records.
In February 2015, days before the news broke that Mrs. Clinton used a personal email address during her time as Secretary of State, NARA received an inquiry from a staffer on the Congressional Benghazi committee seeking information about the State Department’s records management system. In a prepared a response that was to be sent to staffer, Wester wrote, “the State Department records management program and staff are considered very strong. NARA has awarded the State Department two Archivist Achievement Awards in Records Management in the past decade.”
Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein issued the following statement:
“These records reveal that before Hillary Clinton exited the State Department, there were serious concerns about her violating federal records laws. Yet, despite knowledge by the State Department and the Archives, nothing was done about it. What’s clear is that without pressure from transparency organizations like mine, the public would never get the full story of what happened behind the scenes regarding Mrs. Clinton’s emails.”
