By Arshad Mohammed
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department does not automatically archive the emails of its assistant secretaries of state, U.S. officials said on Thursday, contradicting the agency's prior public statement.
Assistant secretaries, who include the top diplomats for regions such as Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, are not among the group of senior officials whose emails have been systematically captured since February, the officials said.
The State Department's email practices have come under scrutiny since the disclosure that former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a private email address and server for her official email communications when she was in office.
Earlier this month, the State Department said it had begun automatically archiving Secretary of State John Kerry's emails shortly after he took office in early 2013.
On Friday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that as of February the department had also begun automatically capturing emails of the two deputy secretaries of state as well as the agency's under secretaries and assistant secretaries.
However, the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, said the assistant secretaries' emails were not currently being automatically archived.
"It's dozens of senior staff including the deputy secretaries, under secretaries, several senior advisers as well as the secretary's staff, ranging from his chief of staff to assistants who handle paper for the secretary," said one official.
A State Department spokesman said "the department is working to apply a system that meets NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) requirements for the management of emails by the end of 2016, as required by the President's Managing Government Records initiative." He declined further comment.
Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 even though she has yet to formally declare whether she is a candidate, has been forced to answer questions about her email practices as the chief U.S. diplomat.
