Hillary Clinton Emails Had a Two-Month Gap By Byron Tau and Peter Nicholas
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-emails-had-a-two-month-gap-1443647120
Archive of messages turned over to officials begins weeks into the start of her tenure.
WASHINGTON—About two months of emails from the start of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state are missing, and federal officials haven’t been able to recover them.
An archive of records that Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential front-runner, turned over to the State Department doesn’t begin until March 18, 2009, though she took office as secretary of state in late January of that year. The missing emails raise more questions about her stewardship of official documents during her tenure and whether there is a complete record of the early diplomatic efforts of President Barack Obama’s administration.
The potential significance of the missing emails, which Mrs. Clinton’s aides acknowledge and say she no longer can retrieve, came to light last week when a chain of online correspondence between her and former Gen. David Petraeus was found on Defense Department servers. Those messages, which included work-related personnel matters, dated to the period missing from Mrs. Clinton’s records.
The missing records will provide fresh fodder for Mrs. Clinton’s political opponents and members of Congress investigating her email practices. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Sunday showed the race for the Democratic nomination tightening between Mrs. Clinton and her chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and that she was essentially tied with several prospective Republican rivals in hypothetical matchups.
The email gap came years before the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which is the subject of a congressional probe that unearthed Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email server.
On Wednesday, the department released more Clinton emails, about 6,000 pages mostly from 2010 and 2011, to comply with a judge’s order as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
In one, a senior Clinton adviser wrote that most department employees use personal emails and laptops because the government system was essentially nonfunctional.
“I’m sure you’ve thought of this, but it would be a great time for someone inside or outside to make a statement/ write an op-ed that points out that State’s technology is so antiquated that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively,” wrote Anne-Marie Slaughter in 2011.
Tech troubles plagued Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account as late as 2010. Top aide Jake Sullivan complained that he didn’t get an earlier email, prompting Mrs. Clinton to ask another aide to fix her BlackBerry.
“We fixed it both ways,” aide Huma Abedin wrote back, “systemwide so anyone with a clintonemail.com would get thru … and on our individual computers too.”
Mrs. Clinton was also the target of spam. At least five messages she received in August 2011 appear to match pieces of known malware identified by security experts in 2011. The emails, purportedly from New York motor-vehicle officials, notified her of driving violations. As a former first lady, Mrs. Clinton has been under Secret Service protection for about a quarter century. Last year, she said she hadn’t driven a car since 1996.
An Associated Press article published Wednesday said the emails were sent by Russia-linked hackers. A Clinton campaign spokesman, Nick Merrill, said in response to the AP article: “We have no evidence to suggest she replied to this email nor that she opened the attachment. As we have said before, there is no evidence that the system was ever breached. All these emails show is that, like millions of other Americans, she received spam.”
Even the phone system didn’t seem to work at times. In one email, Mrs. Clinton vented about trying to dial the White House. The White House operator “doesn’t believe who I am,” she wrote, adding she couldn’t provide her direct line to the operator because she didn’t know it. “I told him I had no idea what my direct office [number] was since I didn’t call myself,” she wrote.
Aides say Mrs. Clinton used two email addresses during the first two months of the Obama administration: an AT&T BlackBerry account from her Senate days as well as a personal account using the address hdr22@clintonemail.com. Previously, they had said she started using the clintonemail.com account in March and used her AT&T account in the first two months.
They reversed course after the Petraeus emails on the clintonemail.com account from January were discovered. No records from either account were given to the State Department by Mrs. Clinton’s attorneys for that eight-week time period in question.
Clinton campaign officials said her clintonemail.com account wasn’t moved to a server at her Chappaqua, N.Y., home until March, and her representatives have no access to any prior records. They are unable to definitively say which server hosted the clintonemail.com account before it was moved to the home server. That server is now in the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is conducting a counterintelligence investigation and a forensic data recovery. It was also used by former President Bill Clinton’s personal office, a Clinton campaign official said.
An attorney and a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton didn’t respond to questions about if she took any steps to preserve records from the first weeks of the administration. Her aides have said her AT&T BlackBerry account was shut down some time in 2009.
“Given her practice from the beginning of emailing State Department officials on their state.gov accounts, her work-related emails during these initial weeks would have been captured and preserved in the State Department’s record-keeping system. She, however, no longer had access to these emails once she transitioned from this account,” her campaign said on its website.
Jim Greer, a spokesman for AT&T, said that BlackBerry managed email servers for its own devices in 2009, even if the user was an AT&T customer. BlackBerry declined to comment about whether user data could be recovered from 2009 and whether federal investigators have contacted them about recovery efforts.
Federal records experts say it was Mrs. Clinton’s responsibility to preserve her work emails—whether was on a BlackBerry server, her own personal server or any other commercial or private service.
“She violated the Federal Records Act through her scheme of using only a personal account and compounding that with use of a private server—and now, it appears, in an additional way by shutting down BlackBerry accounts that contained her official emails for several weeks at the outset of her tenure,” said Dan Metcalfe, former director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy, who now teaches at American University. Mr. Metcalfe served at Justice during Republican and Democratic administrations, including Mr. Clinton’s.
Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email wasn’t expressly prohibited but was discouraged. Further, federal laws required that she maintain all copies of work-related material. State Department officials have said their initial request to Mrs. Clinton for any government records last year covered all records, during any time period.
“In October of last year, the State Department wrote to Secretary Clinton asking her to provide any federal records in her possession. That request covered records of any format, whether paper or electronic and was not limited to any single email account,” a department official said.
The Federal Records Act—the law that governs federal records for most executive-branch officials, not people in Congress—permits the attorney general to attempt to recover lost documents. But such a scenario is rare, and the act is an administrative one, with no criminal penalties attached to any failure to comply.
The Justice Department and the National Archives and Records Administration declined to comment on whether such a referral had been made or what attempts either department is making with regards to the two months of missing emails.
Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at a Drinker Biddle and former director of litigation at the Archives, said that enforcement of federal records laws was difficult.
“There isn’t a NARA records police,” said Mr. Baron. “The sun comes up every morning and not every federal employee acts to properly comply with the Federal Records Act in every instance. Especially when it comes to email record-keeping, we have been living in an imperfect world for quite some time.”
—Laura Meckler, Colleen McCain Nelson and Emma Court contributed to this article.
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