Spotlight: New watchdog report stokes lingering doubts about Hillary's email practice

A long-awaited report by the U.S. State Department's independent watchdog went public on Thursday, shedding light on Hillary Clinton's controversial emailing practice while taking the helm at the U.S. State Department.

While the report by the State Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) echoed criticism by Clinton critics who had argued over the past year that Clinton failed to comply with the department's email rules by exclusively relying on a private email acount and server for business, some details of the report raised fresh doubts about Clinton's previous claim of the issue.

At a press conference in March, 2015, Clinton acknowledged that she had exchanged about 60,000 emails from her private email account during her stint in the Obama administration, among which about half were personal and thus deleted.

In response to requests from the State Department, the Clinton camp turned over the other half, roughly 30,000 emails in total, to the State Department in December, 2014.

On the campaign trail, Clinton repeatedly said that her practices were allowed by the department. However, the report showed that Clinton never requested permission to use her private server and email account. Neither were her practices approved.

"OIG found not evidence that the Secretary requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server," said the report, adding that Clinton's request "would not" have been approved because of "the security risks in doing so."

The 83-page report also added new details about her motivation for the setup of the private emailing system.

Clinton said previously on many occasions that her exclusive reliance on a personal email account for business was due to "convenience". However, newly disclosed email communications between her and one senior aide indicated otherwise.

In November, 2010, Huma Abedin, her then deputy chief of staff discussed with her about "putting you on State email" to protect her email from spam. Clinton declined the suggestion, saying that she did not "want any risk of the personal being accessible."

The back-and-forth were not included in the roughly 30,000 emails the Clinton team had handed over to the State Department.

While the OIG report did not explain how the State Department got the additional emails, it did point out that Clinton's production was incomplete.

"For example, the Department and OIG both determined that the production included no email covering the first few months of Secretary Clinton's tenure- from January 21, 2009, to March 17, 2009, for received messages; and from January 21, 2009, to April 12, 2009, for sent messages," said the report.

The Defense Department handed over to OIG last September copies of 19 emails between Clinton and General David Petraeus, the report added.

The report also indicated inconsistency in Clinton's claim that there was no indication that hackers had ever managed to hack into her email account.

According to the report, two Clinton's immediate staff discussed via email in May, 2011, that Clinton was concerned that someone was "hacking into her email" after she received an email with a suspicious link.

Neither Clinton nor her staff reported the incident to computer security personnel within the department as required by existing policies, said the report. Enditem