There Is No Way That Hillary Clinton Didn't Know She Was Supposed To Use A Government Email Account

from the this-makes-no-sense dept

As you may have heard, the latest political "scandal" involving a major Presidential contender comes via the NY Times reporting that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she refused to have a government email address, and conducted all her work via a personal email account.

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

This is dumb on many, many levels and there appears to be no excuse for it happening. First off, using a personal email as Secretary of State seems like a massive privacy and security risk. While one hopes that there was at least some attempt to better secure her personal account by government security experts, it's still almost certainly less secure. Given how much sensitive information the Secretary of State has to deal with, it seems inexcusable that she was allowed to conduct official business via her personal account. That to me seems like an even bigger deal than the part that everyone else is focused on: the failure to preserve her emails as required by law.

Of course, the failure to preserve the emails is a big deal as well. But here's the really stunning thing: there is simply no way that Clinton and others in the administration didn't know that she was supposed to be using a government email address and preserving those emails. That's because both the previous administration and others in her own administration got in trouble for using personal email addresses. As Vox notes, towards the end of the Bush administration there was a similar scandal involving a variety of high level administration members using personal email to conduct government business and to avoid transparency requirements.

That scandal unfolded well into the final year of Bush's presidency, then overlapped with another email secrecy scandal, over official emails that got improperly logged and then deleted, which itself dragged well into Obama's first year in office. There is simply no way that, when Clinton decided to use her personal email address as Secretary of State, she was unaware of the national scandal that Bush officials had created by doing the same.

That she decided to use her personal address anyway showed a stunning disregard for governmental transparency requirements. Indeed, Clinton did not even bother with the empty gesture of using her official address for more formal business, as Bush officials did.

But that's not all. What the Vox report doesn't note is that the scandal actually carried over to the Obama administration also, as the White House's first Deputy CTO was reprimanded for using his personal email address as well, early in 2010. So there was both a scandal about the similar use of private email accounts in the previous administration and in the Obama administration. It's impossible to believe that Clinton or the other key people who worked for her in the State Department were unaware of one or both of these issues while she was using her personal email address.

While the White House's email system may be clunky and annoying to use (as I've heard repeatedly), there's simply no excuse for Clinton not to have used it at all -- and for the emails she did send not to be preserved as required under the law. A few years ago, we mocked Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano for refusing to use email entirely -- though at least she was upfront about the reason. She didn't want to be held accountable for what she said -- though, the reality was she would still have staff members send emails for her. Clinton appears to have wanted to be free of that accountability as well, but to still have the benefits of direct electronic communication herself. In short, she purposely ignored the law for her own benefit.

Filed Under: email, hillary clinton, personal email accounts, public records, scandals, transparency

DC Circuit Court Tells District Officials They Can No Longer Hide From FOIA Requests By Using Personal Email Accounts

from the seriously,-stop-being-assholes-about-this dept

With the FOIA process increasingly being routed through courtrooms, it's refreshing to see a court stand up and tell public officials to stop trying to find ways to be less transparent. The DC circuit court recently issued a ruling that shuts down a potential opacity loophole for public officials: the use of personal email accounts.

City officials who conduct public business on personal email accounts must turn their personal emails over in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, according to a recent, first-of-its-kind ruling in D.C. Superior Court.

The July 9 order by Judge Stewart Nash brings the District into line with the majority of states that have addressed the issue, signaling an emerging trend in favor of government transparency—if not an end to efforts to work around disclosure laws.

The district's attorneys tried to argue that the neighborhood advisory commission's emails (at least those routed in and out of Commissioner Dianne Barnes' personal account) were exempt from FOIA requests because the account used wasn't a district-owned account, but the judge wasn't buying it.

"This argument requires the Court to ignore Ms. Barnes’s position as Commissioner of the ANC," the judge wrote. "To the extent that Ms. Barnes is acting in her capacity as Commissioner of the ANC, then communications made or received by her would be communications of the ANC, irrespective of whether such communications were associated with her personal e-mail account."

Public officials (like former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg) have tried to keep certain communications out of the hands of the public by using personal devices and email accounts. To a certain extent, this has worked. But many states have established policies in order to close this loophole, basically stating that it doesn't matter where the communication originates but what the subject matter is.

As that view has been challenged, states have increasingly found that the content, not the ownership of the device or account, is the determining factor of whether a communication about public business is subject to FOIA disclosure laws, according to the peer-reviewed journal Communication Law and Policy.

Which is as it should be. The Freedom of Information law was created to help the public hold their representatives and public servants accountable, as well as to provide insight to the how and why of government activity. Routing around this by using personal devices cuts the public out of the loop. A government that often argues "nothing to hide" means "nothing to fear" certainly seems to be doing a lot of hiding, leading directly to people questioning what exactly it has to fear. Considering these are people in seats of power, these deliberate attempts to hide public communications is, at the very least, misconduct, if not actual cowardice.

Judge Nash's earlier verbal order for the district to turn over the requested emails was ignored. Now, it's in writing. Without a doubt, the district will challenge this ruling before it hands over anything, forcing a member of the public to spend even more money and time suing the government into compliance with its own statutes and laws.

Filed Under: emails, foia, freedom of information, government officials, personal email accounts, stewart nash, transparency