Clinton email update

Gawker - According to a knowledgeable source, at least two other top Clinton aides also used private email accounts to conduct government business—placing their official communications outside the scope of federal record-keeping regulations. “Her top staffers used those Clinton email addresses” at the agency, said the source, who has worked with Clinton in the past. The source named two staffers in particular, Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, who are said to have used private email addresses in the course of their agency duties. Reines served as deputy assistant secretary of state, and Abedin as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. Both rank among Clinton’s most loyal confidantes, in and out of the State Department.


BBC - The story is particularly damaging to Mrs Clinton because it plays into two existing negative perceptions about both the former secretary of state and her husband - that they are overly secretive and they believe the normal rules don't apply to them.

"As far as the story backs up previously conceived ideas about the Clintons' level of transparency and, more specifically, about Hillary Clinton's insularity, it could give her opponents some pretty potent ammunition," he writes.

Reaction on the left, so far, has been one of incredulity. How could Mrs Clinton have been so negligent? Why didn't anyone - within the State Department or elsewhere in the US government - step forward and tell her this was a bad idea?

Vox's Max Fisher points out that when Mrs Clinton took the State Department portfolio in 2009, several high-level Bush administration officials - including White House advisor Karl Rove - were under fire for conducting official business on personal email accounts using Republican Party-issued laptop computers.

"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," he writes.

Ben Shapiro -  Clinton is hardly the first Obama administration official to utilize a private email account to shield herself. Lisa Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency used a private email address under the name "Richard Windsor" to conduct official business. According to Vice News' Jason Leopold, the Department of Defense told him that they would not release any emails from former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, since "SecDef does not maintain an official email account." Other Obama administration officials using unofficial email accounts include former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Donald Berwick, the former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Daily Beast - Hilllary Clinton created her own private email system that she exclusively used as secretary of state, ignoring “very specific guidance” from the White House by not even creating, let alone using, a government email account. The Associated Press traced the computer server that sent and received Clinton’s emails back to her home in Chappaqua, New York. The practice gave Clinton “impressive control over limiting access to her message archives” and surpassed privatizing practices used by other politicans who employed Yahoo or Microsoft email accounts. “Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative, or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails,” the AP writes. In addition, homemade email servers are not as reliable or secure from hackers as those in commercial data centers.

Al Jazeera America - State Department technology experts expressed security concerns that then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was using a private email service rather than the government’s fortified and monitored system, but those fears fell on deaf ears, a current employee on the department’s cybersecurity team told Al Jazeera America. The employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said it was well known that Clinton’s emails were at greater risk of being hacked, intercepted or monitored, but the warnings were ignored. “We tried,” the employee said. “We told people in her office that it wasn’t a good idea. They were so uninterested that I doubt the secretary was ever informed.”

Guardian - Perhaps the most serious accusation facing Clinton is that she may have breached one of the fundamental tenets of classified information. J William Leonard, former director of the body that keeps watch over executive branch secrets, the Information Security Oversight Office, told the Guardian that if Clinton had dealt with confidential government matters through her personal email, that would have been problematic. “There is no such thing as personal copies of classified information. All classified information belongs to the US government and it should never leave the control of the government.”

Mother Jones - According to the National Archives and Records Administration, there was a regulation in place governing Clinton's use of personal email for official business while she was secretary of state. And it seems she did not fully abide by this. In a statement issued today, the National Archives notes that it has "reached out to the State Department to ensure that all federal records are properly identified and managed." And the statement says:

Since 2009, NARA's regulations have stated that "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."

This rule is clear: If Clinton used personal email to conduct official business—which apparently did not violate any federal rules at the time—all of those emails had to be collected and preserved within the State Department's recordkeeping system. That makes sense: The whole point of preserving official records of government business is to have this material controlled by the government, not by the individual official or employee. Yet in this case, Clinton and her aides apparently did not preserve all her emails within the system.