WASHINGTON — The State Department’s internal watchdog has found that many department employees are not preserving e-mails for the public record as required by the government. That could mean a substantial amount of lost government information.
The inspector general’s office, in a report out Wednesday, said that in 2011, when Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state, department employees wrote more than 1 billion e-mails but only marked 61,156 for the public record. There’s no way to know how many should have been designated as public records. The year when she left the department, 41,749 e-mails were marked for public records.
The investigation found that employees had no central oversight of their record-keeping responsibilities with e-mail, many did not know the rules and some feared the consequences of their e-mails being searched and exposed.
