Approximately eight months before Hillary Clinton left Foggy Bottom, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration resigned because of a scathing report by the State Department’s Inspector General’s office.
According to Josh Rogan, who wrote about the resignation in Foreign Policy at the time:
Gration’s independent streak and insistence on doing things his own way, outside of the interagency policy process, ran afoul of the embassy staff in Nairobi almost immediately. Multiple sources familiar with the disputes confirmed reports Friday that Gration preferred to use his Gmail account for official business and set up private offices in his residence — and an embassy bathroom — to conduct business outside the purview of the embassy staff. [Emphasis added]
Indeed, the bottom of page 43 of the Inspector General’s critical report begins:
Very soon after the Ambassador’s arrival in May 2011, he broadcast his lack of confidence in the information management staff. Because the information management office could not change the Department’s policy for handling Sensitive But Unclassified material, he assumed charge of the mission’s information management operations. He ordered a commercial Internet connection installed in his embassy office bathroom so he could work there on a laptop not connected to the Department email system. He drafted and distributed a mission policy authorizing himself and other mission personnel to use commercial email for daily communication of official government business. During the inspection, the Ambassador continued to use commercial email for official government business. The Department email system provides automatic security, record-keeping, and backup functions as required. The Ambassador’s requirements for use of commercial email in the office and his flouting of direct instructions to adhere to Department policy have placed the information management staff in a conundrum: balancing the desire to be responsive to their mission leader and the need to adhere to Department regulations and government information security standards.
Now if the ambassador to Kenya got an awful performance report that forced him to resign, logic dictates that the Secretary of State would know about it even before the ambassador found out. And unless that Secretary of State was mentally challenged, she would realize that she herself was using a private system that didn’t “provides automatic security, record-keeping, and backup functions as required” and that she didn’t “adhere to Department regulations and government information security standards.”
Mrs. Clinton has some explaining to do.
(h/t Weekly Standard)
Cross-posted at The Lid
