Jen Psaki: Federal Employees Are Not Required To Sign Exit Statement (Video)

After a week of stonewalling, the State Department finally admitted that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not sign an “exit statement” when she left office.

The AP’s Matt Lee brought it up again at Tuesday’s State Dept. press briefing:

“It is my understanding that all employees – (and I think you even alluded to this when it first came up) that all employees are required to sign this document on completion of their government service. Is that not the case?” he asked.

State Dept Spokeswoman Jen Psaki replied, “‘required’ is not an accurate term – we’re looking into how standard this is across the federal government and of course, the State Department. But we’re not aware of any penalty for not signing it.”

So that’s the new spin. The stonewalling wasn’t working because reporters were actually doing their jobs and pressing the subject. Now Psaki is allowed to admit that Hillary didn’t sign the form – but hey – no biggie – she wasn’t “required” to. Apparently top officials in the Obama administration get to keep all of their emails secret from the public and from government oversight in perpetuity. Or at least until someone calls them out on it. And then it’s too late because all of the most important emails have been destroyed by then.  Thankfully though, Jen is looking into how widespread this “standard” problem is.

Judge Napolitano on Fox News has been saying for the past week that whether Hillary Clinton signed an exit statement or not, she loses, because as he says, “the premise of the law is – these are not her emails.”

“These are the government’s emails, and the government is to have custody of them. When she leaves office, she’s to ask the government to surrender her personal emails and the government reviews them. She did the opposite – she kept all of them, she had her people review them, she had her people decide which 33,000 were to be destroyed – (that’s the destruction of government property, another crime) – and which ones to give back to the government. That absolutely and profoundly violates the statute,” he said.