Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email At State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules

 

 

 

 

 

” 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.

  It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

  Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.”

  How could this secretive practice in any way be acceptable in a public official ? We fail to understand how this could be conceived as anything other than a blatant attempt to control what parts of her “official” business are made available for public view .

“ I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business,” said Mr. Baron, who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.

  Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records.

  But Mrs. Clinton and her aides failed to do so.

  How many emails were in Mrs. Clinton’s account is not clear, and neither is the process her advisers used to determine which ones related to her work at the State Department before turning them over.”

   No matter how one looks at it , EVERY correspondence of EVERY government official , making allowances for certain matters of national security , are PUBLIC property , generated in the public interest and paid for with public funds and thus are required to be archived and saved for future investigation . 

   How is Hillary’s staff picking and choosing exactly what correspondence the taxpayers , historians , reporters and regulators have access to any different than shredding documents or Nixon’s missing Watergate tapes ? And this woman thinks she deserves to be president . Shame , shame , shame …

   It’s not like Mrs Clinton has a stellar record of forthrightness to fall back on . As a matter of fact her past history belies exactly the opposite what with her being fired from the Watergate investigation , Travelgate , Whitewater , Rose Law firm billing records etc. On the contrary the woman is the picture of obfuscation and secrecy , much like her old boss .

Read it all at the NY Times 

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