An independent audit into the private email account of Hillary Clinton–used during her tenure as Secretary of State–found her as acting irresponsibly in regards to repeated warnings from the State Department. The audit–78 pages in total–said Clinton ignored directives from the State Department in regards to private email as concerns about the legality of passing classified government documents through a private account were brushed aside. It also acknowledged that her private home server might have been breached by hackers, a point Clinton’s aides deny.

Other notable takeaways from the audit:

• Though she was briefed about cybersecurity risks in a memo in 2011, Clinton’s account did not meet minimum security guidelines as outlined by the State Department and as required under the Federal Records Act.
• Before her duties as Secretary of State ended in 2013, Clinton should have turned over all emails to the department. She released only half of those emails, and only after her use of a private server was revealed by media reports in 2015.
• Although Clinton and her aides have agreed to cooperate in an ongoing FBI investigation into the affair, none would comply with the independent audit. But on CBS’s “Face the Nation” this month: “I’ve made it clear that I’m more than ready to talk to anybody, anytime. And I’ve encouraged all of (my staff) to be very forthcoming,” Clinton said.

As expected, Clinton’s aides rushed to her defense and Republican critics seized the audit as proof she is unsuitable to be president.

“The inspector general documents just show how consistent her email practices were with those of other secretaries and senior officials at the State Department who also used personal email,” said Brian Fallon, Clinton’s campaign spokesman, in regards to the audit’s findings that previous secretaries–including Colin Powell–have used similarly private servers in the past. But according to the report, Clinton’s methods were “considerably more detailed and more sophisticated” than past secretaries.

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, saw the findings as more than a mere slip-up: “The stakes are too high in this election to entrust the White House to someone with as much poor judgment and reckless disregard for the law as Hillary Clinton,” he said.

What Wednesday’s report means for the ongoing FBI investigation into the matter is unclear, but as the November election inches closer into view, it’s an issue to keep an eye on in the coming months.

Alec Siegel

Alec Siegel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. When he’s not working at Law Street he’s either cooking a mediocre tofu dish or enjoying a run in the woods. His passions include: gooey chocolate chips, black coffee, mountains, the Animal Kingdom in general, and John Lennon. Baklava is his achilles heel. Contact Alec at ASiegel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Hillary Clinton might have some explaining to do before she can claim the top spot in the Democratic primary. Any pro-Hillary voters who prioritize moral plans for American foreign policy should probably look into the candidate’s past in Haiti. The Pulitzer Center hosted journalist Jonathan M. Katz on Monday night for a discussion about the Clintons’ influence and rather infamous legacy in Haiti and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. It’s surprising how little the failures and destruction of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presence in Haiti have been brought up so far. Hopefully by 2016 this topic will be making headlines.

First, some background on the topic: on January 12, 2010, the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded in the hemisphere, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake, devastated Haiti’s southern peninsula and killed 100,000 to 316,000 people. Former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led the Haitian reconstruction effort and vowed to help the country “build back better,” so that if another disaster struck, Haiti would be able to respond more quickly and with more efficiency. Hillary described their efforts as a “road test” that would reveal “new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world.”

The Clinton Foundation alone has directed $36 million to Haiti since 2010. Another $55 million has been spent through the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, and an additional $500 million has been made in commitments through the Clinton Global Initiative’s Haiti Action Network. But what does Haiti have to show for all of these investments? Not much, according to Katz. “Haiti and its people are not in a better position now from when the earthquake struck,” he said. The hundreds of millions of dollars and the years of reconstruction efforts have yielded negligible results. For a project so expansive, Hillary has kept relatively quiet about Haiti thus far in her campaign. Her spokesman declined to comment on how Haiti has shaped her foreign policy, saying Hillary would address that “when the time comes to do so.”

Hillary’s big plan for how she would “rebuild” Haiti in the wake of desolation was characteristically American: through business. With big corporate plans on the horizon, Bill and Hillary became exceedingly familiar faces in Haiti leading up to the 2011 presidential elections. It’s not surprising that the candidate who vowed to make Haiti “open for business” was ultimately the victor. Former Haitian pop star Michel Martelly eventually won the race, after Hillary salvaged his candidacy when he was eliminated as the number 3 candidate by convincing the parties to accept him back into the race. Katz said that this vote was fraudulent. Martelly, a businessman and strong proponent of foreign investment in Haiti, was “attractive” to the State Department, Katz noted. He very much had a “Clinton view of Haiti and a Clinton view of the world.”

That’s how Caracol Industrial Park, a 600-acre garment factory geared toward making clothes for export to the U.S., was born in 2012. Bill lobbied the U.S. Congress to eliminate tariffs on textiles sewn in Haiti, and the couple pledged that through Caracol Park, Haitian-based producers would have comparative advantages that would balance the country’s low productivity, provide the U.S. with cheap textiles, and put money in Haitians’ pockets. The State Department promised that the park would create 60,000 jobs within five years of its opening, and Bill declared that 100,000 jobs would be created “in short order.” But Caracol currently employs just 5,479 people full time. “The entire concept of building the Haitian economy through these low-wage jobs is kind of faulty,” Katz stated on Monday. Furthermore, working conditions in the park are decent, but far from what should be considered acceptable.

Not only did Caracol miss the mark on job creation, but it also took jobs away from indigenous farmers. Caracol was built on fertile farmland, which Haiti doesn’t have much of to begin with. According to Katz, Haitian farmers feel that they have been taken advantage of, their land taken away from them, and that they have not been compensated fairly. Hundreds of families have been forced off the land to make room for Caracol. The Clintons led the aggressive push to make garment factories to better Haiti’s economy, but what it really created was wealth for foreign companies. This trend was echoed when the Clintons helped launch a Marriott hotel in the capital, which has really only benefited wealthy foreigners and the Haitian elite.

Mark D’Sa, Senior Advisor for Industrial Development in Haiti at the U.S. Department of State, said that many of the Clintons’ promises remain unfulfilled and many more projects are “half-baked.” Haiti remains the most economically depressed country on the continent. If Hillary wins in 2016, U.S. policy geared toward Haiti will undoubtedly expand, meaning even more money will be funneled to the Caribbean nation to fund the Clintons’ projects, for better or for worse. According to Katz, the truth is that we don’t actually know how much money has been thrown into the Caribbean country to “rebuild” it, and that with economic growth stalling and the country’s politics heading for a shutdown, internal strife seems imminent.

The introduction of accountability for the foreign aid industry is the most important change that can be made, according to Katz. Humanitarian aid does nothing positive or productive if there are not institutions in place, managed by individuals who actually live in these countries, to oversee that aid is serving rather than hurting the people it is supposed to “help.” Hillary Clinton’s efforts in Haiti have fueled political corruption, destroyed arable farmland, and have forced hundreds of families to leave their homes and their jobs to make room for a factory that has not given even a fraction of the amount to Haiti as it has taken. If the introduction of accountability is the way to go, then we first need to start talking. So Hillary, what do you have to say about Haiti?

Emily Dalgo

Emily Dalgo is a member of the American University Class of 2017 and a Law Street Media Fellow during the Summer of 2015. Contact Emily at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Right now there’s a controversy over emails in the U.S. government. It all started with the news that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email address to conduct her job in the State Department. However, the controversy has continued with politicians and prominent figures from both sides of the aisle coming out in support or condemnation, and raising what could have been an interesting conversation about the use of email in our government.

In terms of Clinton’s emails, it’s unclear whether or not what she did was technically illegal. However, it’s definitely frowned upon, especially in light of the scrutiny that Clinton herself levied against the private email accounts used in the Bush Administration. That being said, Clinton has now turned over many pages of her correspondence, roughly 55,000 pages worth. Some of the criticism toward Clinton has to do with concerns that the American people still don’t have full information over the terrorist attack against the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya in 2012. However, Representative Aaron Schiff (D-CA) has said that the committee looking into the Benghazi incident got everything they asked for from Clinton, and that there was nothing that they found probative.

Colin Powell, another former Secretary of State, has also come to Clinton’s defense, explaining with regard to his emails:

I don’t have any to turn over, I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files. And, in fact, a lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and the state.gov domain. But I don’t know if the servers at the State Department captured those or not. They were all unclassified and most of them, I think, are pretty benign. So I’m not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them.

It’s not just her predecessors who are weighing in on this debate. While some Democrats have shown strong support, others have urged her to give an explanation for why her personal account was used during that period. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), for example, declared that Clinton needs to explain exactly what happened with the email mix up, and emphasized that continued silence would just hurt her moving forward.

On the other hand, some Republicans have taken advantage of the confusion and controversy to slam the likely 2016 presidential candidate. That’s to be expected, of course, but some have also taken the opportunity to prove how different they are than Clinton–and presumably by extension, all Democrats. The most obvious example is Senator Lindsey Graham, who on “Meet the Press” this week told everyone “I don’t email. No, you can have every email I’ve ever sent. I’ve never sent one.”

In some ways I suppose that’s not that surprising. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out, 15 percent of American adults don’t use the Internet. That being said, Graham is also on the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, so his admission that he doesn’t use email could definitely be considered troublesome.

Graham wasn’t the only Republican figure who proclaimed that he shies away from e-mail. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) of 2008 election fame explained that he doesn’t use e-mail because:

I’m afraid that if I was emailing, given my solid, always calm temperament that I might email something that I might regret. You could send out an email that you would regret later on and would be maybe taken out of context And frankly, I don’t have any trouble communicating with my constituents without it.

This entire debate truly strikes me as odd, because what could have actually been a productive discussion about the ethics of communicating with private or business email addresses has sparked a lot of other, significantly less productive talking points. Besides feeding into the incredibly inane Benghazi speculation that seems like it will go on forever, our politicians are now bragging about their detachment from technology. Are we suddenly going to have all the potential 2016 candidates proclaiming whether or not they use e-mail? It’s a pretty ubiquitous tool that most of us use in daily life–I don’t think it’s really a political position.

I’ve long thought that the 2016 elections were going to be particularly nasty–even nastier than 2008 and 2012 in many ways. I think we’re starting to see the beginning of what will be a lot of highly publicized debates over, quite frankly, nothing of consequence.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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