AND THEY’LL KEEP STALLING UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION: State Dept. months late on explaining Clinton aide’s missing emails.
The State Department is months behind on a request that it explain how a former IT aide’s emails appeared to have disappeared, and Republicans are crying foul.
Documents obtained by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and given to ABC News on Wednesday reportedly show that the State Department has not responded to a July request from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) despite a demand that it do so within 30 days.
The missing emails are from Bryan Pagliano, an IT worker responsible for many aspects of the private email setup Hillary Clinton used during her time as secretary of State.
In May, the State Department said that it did not have Pagliano’s email archive, prompting outrage from the Obama administration’s critics. It’s unclear whether Pagliano deleted his emails or they went missing through some other means.
Despite the missing archive, the department has located some emails that Pagliano sent or received through the email accounts of other government staffers.
The National Archives, which has broad responsibilities for federal record storage, asked the State Department to describe the steps it has taken to recover Pagliano’s emails this summer. So far, officials have not responded.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said the department is “still in the process” of responding to the letter.
“As we have publicly explained months ago, the department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” Kirby said in a statement, referring to a file type for storing emails. He noted that department employees’ emails are not always stored automatically, “so the absence of this email file does not necessarily indicate that Mr. Pagliano intentionally deleted his emails.”
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus accused the Obama administration of orchestrating a “cover-up” in order to help Clinton.
That’s a fair accusation.