Testifying at a Congressional hearing yesterday on Hillary Clinton's use of a private email address for official business, a senior State Department official said "the message is loud and clear that that is not acceptable."

Joyce Barr, the Assistant Secretary of State for Administration and chief Freedom of Information Act officer for the agency, told the assembled committee that "the actions that we’ve taken in the course of recovering these emails has made it very clear what the responsibilities are with regard to record-keeping."

Committee members questioned Barr on whether records otherwise obtainable under FOIA had been lost because they went to a private account, and Barr responded that Clinton has turned over emails to properly archive them — although, as committee members noted, that requires taking Clinton at her word that the emails are complete. One committee member said the State Department's record on FOIA in general was an "embarrassing failure."

The testimony was significant as it came from former Secretary of State Clinton's own department, and with 55,000 pages of Clinton's emails now being processed for release under FOIA, scrutiny is likely to increase.