State Department Audit Slams Hillary!

Also in related news:

The Romanian hacker who claimed he easily breached Hillary Clinton’s email server pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to two counts of computer hacking charges, as part of a deal with the Justice Department. 

In exchange for a reduced sentence, Marcel Lehel Lazar – also known as Guccifer — has agreed to cooperate with federal authorities in the future.

(Fox News)

Politico has this:

Significantly, the report also reveals that Clinton and her top aides at State – Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, and possibly others – refused to cooperate with the IG’s investigation despite the IG’s requests that they submit to interviews.

The report is devastating, although it transparently strains to soften the blow. For example, it concludes that State’s “longstanding systemic weaknesses” in recordkeeping “go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State.” Yet, it cannot avoid finding that Clinton’s misconduct is singular in that she, unlike he predecessors, systematically used private email for the purpose of evading recordkeeping requirements.

(National Review)

…A long-awaited State Department inspector general report on the impact of personal email use on recordkeeping at State was released to lawmakers on Wednesday, and concluded that Clinton violated the agency’s records rules. And as many Americans prepare for the traditional Memorial Day kickoff to the summer season, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills is scheduled to sit for a sworn deposition Friday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch.

Mills’ testimony would be the first known time a member of Clinton’s inner circle has been questioned under oath in the email controversy. Another top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, is set to testify next month. And Clinton herself is awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether she should be required to give a deposition.

No matter how that comes out, Clinton also faces an ongoing FBI investigation into the email set up. Some of her aides have already been questioned. She’s expressed a willingness to sit down with investigators — something they’re expected to take her up on in the next few weeks. Unless it takes place in complete secrecy, such a session would be the highest-profile legal spectacle the former first lady has faced since she testified 20 years ago before a federal grand jury investigating the disappearance and reappearance of Whitewater billing records.

“I think the [Office of Inspector General] report is going to be of interest and the testimony is going to be out there,” said Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton. “I think the courts will take action this summer….I don’t see any of this going away.”

On top of all that, there’s an expected House report on Benghazi. And a slew of planned document releases from the State Department that a conservative group is planning to make into a movie.

“We have been for months and we will be for the next several months on the receiving end of document productions from the State Department and others,” said David Bossie of Citizens United, another conservative organization. “We have been and continue to be in the works on a Hillary documentary….We’d like to have something launch on or around the the Democratic Convention.”

[….]

“Whether it’s the Benghazi report, the state IG report or other types of releases, those are just a variation of bad for Hillary Clinton because on that day and time whenever those happen it is taking her off her message and making her have to answer questions related to these issues that she doesn’t want to talk about,” the veteran GOP operative said. “That’s called winning, if you’re Donald Trump.”

(reads it all)

…A-N-D T-H-E… Washington Times weighs in:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly broke government policy by using her own secret email server and top aides misled other department staff to cover for her, an inspector general concluded in a report sent to Capitol Hill Wednesday.

Not only did her use of the secret server shield her communications from open-records laws, but she also broke department policy by failing to report several hacking attempts, the inspector general said in an 83-page investigative report that is devastating in its conclusions.

After one of the 2011 hack attempts Mrs. Clinton’s tech staffer shut the server down for a few minutes, hoping that would solve the situation, but quickly warned top aides not to send Mrs. Clinton “anything sensitive” after the attempted breach, according to the report, which was obtained by The Washington Times.

After another suspicious attempt Mrs. Clinton said she was scared to open email — but failed to report the matter.

“Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information,” the investigators said. “However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her staff reported these incidents to computer security personnel or anyone else within the Department.”…