Inspector finds State Department lax on preserving emails

The State Department’s internal watchdog has found that many department employees are not preserving emails for the public record as required by the government.

That could mean a substantial amount of government information is being lost to history.

The inspector general, in a report out Wednesday, says that in 2011, when Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state, department employees wrote more than 1 billion emails but only marked 61,156 for the public record. There’s no way to know from the figures how many should have been designated as public records.

The report says many employees don’t know the rules for what emails should be recorded for history, or fear the consequences of having their recorded emails searched and exposed. Some thought the rules were merely for their convenience.