ANALYSIS:

Hillary Clinton’s chief defense of her email behavior is that she tried to forward her messages so they were captured by the State Department — but a Washington Times analysis found she clearly did that only a quarter of the time when she was corresponding with someone outside the department.

More often than not, when Mrs. Clinton was exchanging thoughts or policy memos with outsiders, their correspondence ended up in the digital black hole of her secret email system and were never forwarded to anyone else in the State Department.

SEE ALSO: Hillary Clinton to attack Donald Trump on foreign policy

Although dozens of her top aides knew about her private email, they kept it secret from the State Department office charged with handling open records requests, meaning those staffers didn’t know how to find her messages — effectively shielding them from public view for nearly six years.

Mrs. Clinton, who is now the top candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has said it was a mistake to use the secret system, but she and her defenders say she made a point of trying to email other people on official state.gov addresses, figuring the messages would at least be stored by the government, which would fulfill her legal obligations as secretary of state.

“More than 90 percent of her work-related emails ought to have been preserved in the State Department from the beginning because she either copied, or corresponded with, a staff person using a state.gov account,” Brian Fallon, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, told The Times.

SEE ALSO: Two-thirds of voters say Clinton should release transcripts of Wall Street speeches

The Times’ analysis also confirmed that to be the case for her messages overall: A random sample from the more than 8,000 messages Mrs. Clinton sent showed that 89 percent of them involved a state.gov account.

But when it came to Mrs. Clinton’s communications with those outside the department, she stumbled — badly.

An analysis of 200 messages Mrs. Clinton sent to outsiders found only 51 that were clearly forwarded to a state.gov account, another 131 that were not forwarded, and the rest were unclear, based on the addresses involved.

Mr. Fallon questioned The Times’ sample and said the findings were “inaccurate.”

Messages Mrs. Clinton exchanged with outsiders, and which never got captured in the State Department system, included correspondence with U.S. senators, top White House officials and special advisers.

One message that she sent to a private email account with the subject line “SYRIA TODAY (SUNDAY 7/22)” was later labeled by the State Department as classified because it contained foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources.

In another exchange that wasn’t forwarded to the State Department, Mrs. Clinton and Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski chatted about progress toward expanding the visa waiver system, an issue that the senator described as “so important to Poland and other allies.”

“If anyone can finally get visa waiver done for our Polish friends — who now live a few doors from me! — it’s you, my friend,” Mrs. Clinton told the Maryland Democrat with strong ties to the Polish community in Baltimore.

The State Department’s inspector general, in a report sent to Congress last week, concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s email practices violated several department rules. She did not take steps to ensure her messages were being stored, she never got approval for her use of a secret server, and she failed to report to the department when hackers attempted to access her server.

Story Continues →