STATE DEPARTMENT INSPECTOR GENERAL: Hillary's Private Bathoom Email Server Was, In Fact, Illegal

The Washington Post reluctantly reports:

The State Department’s independent watchdog has issued a highly critical analysis of Hillary Clinton’s email practices while running the department, concluding that Clinton failed to seek legal approval for her use of a private server and that agency staff members would not have given their blessing if it had been sought because of “security risks.”

The report by the inspector general’s office concludes that Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for president, handled email in a way that was “not an appropriate method” for preserving public records and that her practices failed to comply with department policy. The review found that Clinton, who has said her system was secure, also never provided security details to agency officials responsible for safeguarding sensitive government information…

…The IG review found that technical support for the server was primarily provided by a non-State Department employee who worked for former president Bill Clinton, as well as a State employee, who has been publicly identified in the past as Bryan Pagliano.

The Post has reported previously that the Clintons paid Pagliano separately for his work on the server. The IG’s office found that several of his direct State Department supervisors were unaware that he was providing Hillary Clinton with the service, the report says.

The IG’s office also found several incidents in which Clinton or people around her expressed fear that the server, which was stored in the Clintons’ New York home and shared by the couple, might have been hacked. The report cites a January 2011 email in which a Bill Clinton staffer wrote a Hillary Clinton aide to say he had shut down the server because he believed “someone was trying to hack us.”

The IG went on to note that Clinton and her lackeys failed to notify the State Department of possible security breaches (yet another crime) and that her exclusive use of a personal server was “an inappropriate form of [record] preservation.”

Had a normal peon engaged in Hillary’s email skulduggery while handling classified government documents, they’d be breaking rocks at Leavenworth and not wheezing while walking down flights of stairs while wearing Mao-style pantsuits.

Hat tip: BadBlue Real-Time News.