A highly misleading article. I've notice a lot of people use this angle when they want to confuse people:
the only crime greater than using personal email to conduct State business
She’s saying it was “allowed,” an assertion that is backed up by many instances in the report which recognize that personal email use, while generally discouraged, is permitted
As the OIG report also states on page 5, it wasn’t until after Hillary Clinton left the State Department that personal email use was prohibited
in order to slag Hillary for using personal email
The issue isn't that she used a personal email account. At all.
This didn’t quite work out because, as the unreported main focus of the report makes clear, the State Department system is a hot-assed mess. If it weren’t, then none of this would be happening, because they’d be able to sort and retrieve emails the way any Gmail user can.
The author might want to read the OIG's previous report on the SoS's failure to comply with FOIA.
https://oig.state.gov/system/files/esp-16-01.pdf
The searches performed by S/ES do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness. S/ES currently searches Department email accounts only if a FOIA request mentions emails or asks for “all records,” or if S/ES is requested to do so during the course of litigation.
So to be clear, Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email is not the reason the OIG report says she violated the federal recordkeeping rules
No shit. It's using it 100% of the time, using her own private server, which possibly contained classified information, and then failing to turn over the emails for record keeping.
Procedural weaknesses in S/ES FOIA processes appear to be contributing to these deficiencies. For example, S/ES management is not monitoring search results for accuracy, and IPS has limited ability to conduct oversight. S/ES also lacks written policies and procedures for responding to FOIA requests. Finally, staff in S/ES and other components in the Office of the Secretary have not taken training offered by IPS to better understand their FOIA responsibilities.