It Appears the State Department Has Had a Policy of Retaining Senior Officials’ Emails Since 2009

When State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that the emails of senior officials at Foggy Bottom weren’t automatically archived until “February of this year,” it raised the question of why Hillary Clinton had claimed that her emails to colleagues were automatically saved.

“What was her foundation for even that? Did someone incorrectly tell her that that was happening, or did she incorrectly make such a self-serving assumption?” former Justice Department Office of Information and Privacy director Dan Metcalfe wondered to Politico.

Cause of Action (CoA), a government transparency group, thinks it has the answer. “[The State Department] just provided Cause of Action documents showing that the department has required emails to be preserved since 2009,” Dan Epstein, the group’s executive director, says in a written statement to National Review.

The documents Epstein references, which were released to Cause of Action by Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, provide guidance on the State Department’s record-keeping policy.

“As a supplement to existing policy, and consistent with the policy in place since 2009, it is important to capture electronically the email accounts of the [State Department’s] senior officials,” says one memo dated August 28, 2014.

“The State Department should have had possession of Secretary Clinton’s email records when Mrs. Clinton left office,” Epstein says. “The fact that they did not have possession of her emails raises still pressing questions.”

#related#NR asked the State Department if there is a contradiction between the memo and Psaki’s statement. “The comment from Spokesperson Psaki was specifically in reference to an automated program we have to store emails for senior officials,” spokesman Alec Gerlach replies. ”Under Secretary Kennedy is describing a policy, and Psaki was describing a tool to implement it.”

Gerlach explains that “prior to that it had to be done manually for senior officials, for example by printing or saving files to a personal folder. The one exception is Secretary Kerry for whom this system has been in place since shortly after taking office.” Psaki has also noted Kerry’s practice.

Another official at the CoA suggests a second possibility: that the State Department actually does have more emails than previously acknowledged.

“All of those emails that she sent to people, we should be able to retrieve,” the CoA official says.

— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.

Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated since its initial posting.