Hillary Clinton emails violated State Department rules, auditor rules

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Hillary Clinton violated State Department rules in her use of private email while US Secretary of State, an auditor as ruled.

The agency’s Inspector General also revealed that she declined to be interviewed for the investigation

Clinton's use of private email for government purposes, held on a private server at her New York home, has come up in various investigations.

"Longstanding, systemic weaknesses related to electronic records and communications have existed within the Office of the Secretary that go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State," the report has said.

"At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act," it added.

The report said Clinton and her deputies, including Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan and Huma Abedin, declined to be interviewed for the inspector general's investigation, according to Politico.

More than 2,000 classified emails were redacted from Clinton's private email server, but President Obama has said that his former secretary of state would have never intentionally done anything to put the United States at risk.

“Here’s what I know, Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,” President Obama said in April. “There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” he added. “There’s stuff that is really top-secret top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.”

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