Former U.S. ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration surrounded by reporters. Ousted ambassador sounds off on Hillary email flap

A former ambassador now entangled in the storm over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account fired back at the State Department Friday, disputing claims that he made a determined effort to conduct official business via an e-mail system not under government control.

In a lengthy e-mail to POLITICO and other news outlets, Scott Gration, a former Air Force general who served as ambassador to Kenya, brushed aside comparisons between his situation and Clinton’s. However, Gration acknowledged that his dismissal in 2012 — while Clinton was secretary — was due in part to the department’s resistance to his efforts to have easy access to his Gmail account while he served as the top U.S. diplomat in Nairobi.


“My experience was somewhat different than Secretary Clinton’s use of her commercial account, yet I was ‘fired’ for the use of Gmail in the US Embassy, my insistence on improving our physical security posture, and other twisted and false allegations,” Gration wrote from Kenya, where he now works in the private sector. “I’ve chosen to move on and to be better, not bitter.”

Gration portrayed his difficulties as largely a result of clashing with the State Department’s information technology bureaucracy, which he said resisted reasonable requests to enable easy access to his personal e-mail account during the work day.

“It is true that I used my Gmail account to access my alerts and unclassified personal emails. I had subscribed to three ‘alerts’ programs that sent me breaking news stories, analysis of important events, and Africa-related articles…I use Gmail because these services were not available on the State Department’s OpenNet computer network,” the former ambassador wrote. “Over the years, I had also built a professional network that used my Gmail address. I wanted to have access to these capabilities and contacts while at work.”

Gration did not explain why he could not re-direct alerts to his State.gov e-mail address. He did say that the State Department also bucked his attempts to access his personal account via his government Blackberry phone.

“Soon after becoming Ambassador, I tried hard to have my unclassified State Department emails and my Gmail messages displayed as separate accounts on the same State Department Blackberry. I had done this on BlackBerries in the past to eliminate having to carry around two devices. After four months of trying, I gave up and used two Blackberries to read my unclassified email traffic that could easily and safely been displayed on one,” the former ambassador added.

A scathing report issued by the State Department’s Inspector General in 2012 blasted Gration’s tour at the Nairobi embassy, calling his leadership “divisive and ineffective.” It also accused him of being reluctant to accept “clear-cut” decisions from Washington, including what inspectors said was a directive that officials not routinely use private e-mail account for work purposes.

The technology-related issues constitute only a small part of the criticism leveled at Gration in the 2012 report, but they have come under close scrutiny this week as Clinton aides and State Department spokespeople insisted that the department had no clear policy on work-related use of personal e-mail until late last year.

Clinton’s use of the personal e-mail account has led to claims that it was intended to shield her communications from Freedom of Information Act requests and perhaps from Congressional inquiries as well. Gration said his official messages were properly archived.

“It is false that I ignored State Department instructions and willfully disregarded State Department regulations concerning the use of commercial email for official government business. I used the OpenNet for much of my official business as I had full access to this system in my US Embassy office and in my residence,” he said. “My official emails were fully captured in the State Department data bases. I used Gmail for unofficial business and for my personal emails.”

The former ambassador did say that some “edicts” from State’s information technology leaders “didn’t make sense.” He said he could not send a message to a State.gov account from his own Gmail account, except in an emergency, but anyone that did not work for State could send messages from similarly configured accounts. He said he didn’t understand how those restrictions aided security.

In the message to reporters Friday, Gration also sounded off on another topic that has become part of Clinton email flap: a category of State Department information known as “sensitive but unclassified” or “SBU.” He suggested State’s use of the broad label had become flabby and reflexive, avoiding making decisions about whether information merited no special protection or should be relegated to classified systems.

“I realized that US Embassy personnel had to inadvertently violate the procedures as they were currently written,” the former ambassador said. He said he and a State security staffer drafted and sent to Washington a new post policy that “tightened up our procedures so sensitive documents were not compromised [and] caused authors to determine if their words were actually unclassified or should be put into our secure classified system.”

“We’d been lulled into using SBU as a quasi-classification of information…which it was not,” Gration said.

In December, Clinton returned 55,000 pages of work-related emails from her private account to the State Department after it wrote to several former secretaries asking for such records. Officials are now reviewing the messages to see if any contain “sensitive but unclassified” information that should not be made public.

A State Department rule issued in 2005 said the agency had a “general policy” against routine use of private e-mail accounts for work purposes. The statement appears to reflect a broad rule for agency computer use, but it appears in a section of the Foreign Affairs Manual devoted to “sensitive but unclassified” information.

A State Department official said Thursday night that the policy applied only to “SBU” information, not to other unclassified work-related information handled by State employees. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agency was still reviewing whether the 55,000 pages of e-mails Clinton submitted contained SBU information.