Archives officials worried about preserving Hillary's records

Before Hillary Clinton stepped down as secretary of state in early 2013, National Archives officials were warned that her official records might wind up outside the control of the State Department and pledged to take steps to address the issue, newly released records reveal.

“We need to discuss what we know, and how we should delicately go about learning more about, regarding the transition plans for Secretary Clinton’s departure from State,” Paul Wester, chief records officer for the U.S. Government wrote to National Archives colleagues in a Dec. 11, 2012, email message obtained by POLITICO.


Wester said an individual — identified in the released portion of the message only as “Tom” — had raised concerns that an effort was in the works to move Clinton’s files from State’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans for taking her records from State to Little Rock,” Wester wrote. “Tom then got to asking questions about what we are doing to make sure everyone leaving the Administration does not leave with Federal records. I told him we are aware of the issue and are working on it.”

Clinton Library Director Terri Garner said Thursday she was never privy to any discussion about moving Hillary Clinton’s files to Little Rock.

“I have no idea if there was such a discussion,” Garner told POLITICO. “No one ever had it with me, and even if they had I would have told them it would not be appropriate for the William Clinton Presidential Library to house a secretary of state’s official records, former first lady or not.”

A spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said it knew nothing about storing her records at the library.

“We are not aware of any plan along the lines of what appears to have been discussed by the NARA officials,” spokesman Brian Fallon said.

The newly disclosed National Archives records show fears about a possible transfer of Hillary Clinton’s records out of State Department hands were fed by a decades-long battle over records of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who sent near-transcripts of his telephone conversations to the Library of Congress at the end of his tenure. The move blocked public access to the records for a quarter-century, holding out the possibility of release no earlier than five years after Kissinger’s death.

Wester’s email says National Archives official Tom Mills and another person, named “Jay,” were fretting about a possible repeat of the Kissinger episode.

“Tom … and Jay continued to invoke the specter of the Henry Kissinger experience vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton,” Wester wrote.

Clinton’s launch last month of her latest bid for the White House has been clouded by continuing controversy over her decision to use only a personal email account during her four years as America’s top diplomat. One key and unresolved question about the situation is whether State officials or others made any effort to make sure her emails were transferred to State’s custody before she left office in January 2013.

The National Archives correspondence released to POLITICO on Wednesday under the Freedom of Information Act shows that before Clinton departed, some in the government were focused on ensuring that all of her records were properly archived. However, the records do not indicate how or if officials at the National Archives and State followed up on concerns or whether anyone at the National Archives knew about Clinton’s personal email use before February of this year.

Wester said in an interview Thursday that his agency did not end up reaching out to State after the December 2012 discussion about Clinton’s records. Instead, the National Archives continued to circulate general government-wide guidance to agencies about managing their records during personnel transitions like those that often take place at the end of a presidential term.

“The specific Clinton issues we kind of discounted because we knew they, like many federal agencies, had processes in place to deal with the transition of cabinet officials and other senior officials,” Wester said. “We were under the impression the process was working as it was supposed to at the State Department at that time.”

Wester acknowledged that Mills had heard something that made him think Clinton’s paper files might need to be monitored, but Wester emphasized that no one raised any specific concerns about Clinton’s email.

“The issue was [Mills] heard or thought he had heard an issue related to Hillary Clinton’s textual records. We had no information or no inkling of any issues with the email matters that have come to our attention” more recently, Wester said.

Wester said he did not know at the time nor does he know now whether State staffers had any discussion about Clinton’s email at the time she left the department in January 2013.

Transparency advocates said they were troubled that despite the warnings, no action appears to have been taken to recover Clinton’s cache of emails until last October.

“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,” said Dan Epstein of Cause of Action, which also demanded and received the Clinton-related messages the National Archives released this week under FOIA. “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.”

The newly released National Archives messages also show that in the days before the story about Clinton’s private email account broke in The New York Times, Wester praised State’s records-handling policies.

“Overall, 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,” Wester wrote in a Feb. 27 message to a colleague preparing for a conversation with Benghazi committee staffer Kimberly Betz. “They also have strong Records Management Self-Assessment scores.”

The email also shows that the Archives was aware as of February that State’s basic policy for saving email was to “print-and-file” messages required to be saved under federal records law.

A State Department inspector general’s report issued in 2012 found “problematic morale and poor communication” in the State bureau charged with overseeing record keeping.

State’s “records management practices do not meet statutory and regulatory requirements. Although the office develops policy and issues guidance, it does not ensure proper implementation, monitor performance, or enforce compliance,” the IG report found.

However, Wester’s tone was positive in his message to be relayed to the Hill about State’s practices.

“We are not privy to all of their internal deliberations, but we believe State is making good progress on the email management issue,” he wrote.

Asked Thursday about his assurances, Wester said he and his colleagues have only limited insight into what agencies are up to.

“Those were our views based on information the State Department provided to use and also based on routine interaction our staff members have with them,” Wester told POLITICO. “The challenge we have across the federal government is knowing exactly what is happening with thousands of employees within each of the agencies….and what they do on a day-to-day basis.”

After the Clinton email flap erupted in March, Secretary of State John Kerry asked the department’s inspector general to conduct a broad review of the agency’s record-keeping and FOIA processes.

Kerry’s letter came shortly after State disclosed that it did not begin automatically archiving official emails other than Kerry’s until February of this year.

But the newly released records show that State was working to expand its email archiving before the controversy over Clinton’s private email account became public.

“We have now formed a working group on email and are looking at ways in which to manage senior official’s email i.e. the permanent accounts. We may have as many as 700 accounts Department-wide,” State’s top records officer, Tasha Thian, wrote to an archives official in February 2014. The email chain discusses Capstone, a new National Archives policy, announced in 2013, that gives agencies the option of automatically capturing the emails of agency decision makers for archiving.

However, the newly disclosed records also show that in 2011 the State Department turned down an opportunity to take part in a pilot program the National Archives was launching to help agencies manage their email records.

“Unfortunately due to the press of business we are unable to take part in the Email Management 2.0 pilot,” Thian said in an Oct. 26, 2011, email to several National Archives officials. “With several high profile projects to manage, which have significant time constraints, we could not do your pilot justice. Nevertheless, we remain very interested in the progress of the pilots and applaud NARA’s efforts for taking this on.”

Wester said he believes the “Jay” who also cited the history with Kissinger was Jay Bosanko, who had just been named to take over as chief operating officer of the National Archives. In Wester’s December 2012 email, he also notes that other top officials at the agency, including congressional liaison John Hamilton and general counsel Gary Stern, were focused on the need to preserve the records of officials departing in the following weeks.

The so-called Kissinger “telcons” sent to the Library of Congress were returned to State in 2001 after the National Security Archive threatened a lawsuit. The pro-disclosure organization sued State in March, charging that the agency was unduly delaying making a full set of those transcripts public.

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