The Office of Secretary of State going back to Bill Clinton’s presidency is routinely failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, according to a department inspector general report published Thursday.
The staff charged with responding to FOIA inquiries about America’s top envoy has routinely conducted insufficient searches and failed to respond to requests within the 20-day time limit established by the law.
The inspector general noted the Department’s Executive Secretariat (S/ES) “took four and one-half times as long” as the average federal government department did, in 2014, when processing “simple requests.”
“These problems are compounded by the fact that S/ES FOIA responses are sometimes inaccurate,” the report noted, citing a lack of spot checks by the Secretary’s top staffers and incomplete email searches. Despite the lack of oversight, officials from other branches of State still “identified instances in which S/ES reported that records did not exist, even though it was later revealed that such records did exist.”
“OIG’s past and current work demonstrates that Department leadership has not played a meaningful role in overseeing or reviewing the quality of FOIA responses,” the inspector general concluded.
The IG examined 417 requests handled by the Executive Secretariat going back to 1996, when Madeline Albright was President Clinton’s chief diplomat. Fifty-five of the requests took more than 500 days to process, and 243 of them are still pending.
The majority of all inquiries examined, 240 of them, involved former Secretary Hillary Clinton. Of those, 177 are still awaiting a response.
The comptroller’s office also noted that it is still looking into “issues associated with the use of non-Departmental systems to conduct official business and records preservation requirements”—the private email server used by former Secretary Hillary Clinton.
Read the full report here.
