Washington, DC – Cause of Action (CoA) Institute President and CEO and former Federal Judge Alfred J. Lechner, Jr. today released the following statement following the release of a State Department Office of Inspector General (IG) report that found Hillary Clinton failed to comply with the Federal Records Act during her tenure as Secretary of State. The report found that Mrs. Clinton has not provided all of her emails to the State Department, which contradicts previous statements before the courts.
CoA Institute President & CEO Alfred J. Lechner, Jr.: “News reports today that the Department of State Office of Inspector General has determined that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not use the ‘appropriate method’ for preserving her emails support Cause of Action Institute’s work to hold the State Department accountable for its violations of the Federal Records Act. The Inspector General found that the emails Mrs. Clinton belatedly returned to the State Department are an ‘incomplete’ set. Cause of Action Institute will continue to seek to compel Secretary Kerry and the National Archives and Records Management Administration to perform their statutory duties to recover all of Mrs. Clinton’s email records.”
The report states:
“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary. At a minimum, 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 the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”
On July 8, 2015, Cause of Action Institute filed a complaint in federal court in Washington, DC to compel Secretary of State John Kerry and Archivist of the United States David Ferriero to initiate action through the Attorney General to recover all of the records Mrs. Clinton unlawfully alienated from the State Department. The defendants in that suit argued the case was moot because the State Department received 55,000 pages of emails from Mrs. Clinton. The district court agreed with defendants and dismissed the suit. The case is currently on appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Today’s revelations support the position of Cause of Action Institute, as the State Department Office of Inspector General has concluded that not only did Mrs. Clinton fail to comply with the law, but that the State Department has not recovered all of the records.
