How Hillary Clinton May Have Violated Government Rules on Emails

[DesMoinesDem]

How Hillary Clinton May Have Violated Government Rules on Emails
As secretary of state, she did not completely abide by regulations on preserving emails.

—By David Corn
| Tue Mar. 3, 2015 5:30 PM EST

he New York Times set off a Clinton bomb when it revealed Monday night that Hillary Clinton, when she was secretary of state, used a personal email account instead of a government account for all of her official business. The newspaper reported that Clinton had turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department—yet only after her aides had vetted the massive collection of emails and decided which ones to give to the agency. And it noted that the probable 2016 candidate "may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record."

Ka-boom. Another round in the Hillary wars. Her Republican antagonists pointed to this as a sign of Clinton antipathy toward transparency. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza quickly penned a piece headlined, "Hillary Clinton's Private Email Address at State Reinforces Everything People Don't Like About Her." Clintonistas rushed to her defense. Correct the Record, a pro-Clinton outfit, zapped out talking points: She had followed State Department precedent with regard to the use of email; she knew her emails sent to State Department officials at their official accounts would be retained; she has fully cooperated with State Department requests to produce her emails; and Colin Powell used his personal email account when he was secretary of state. Some pro-Clinton observers pointed out that the federal regulation instructing government employees to "not generally use personal email accounts to conduct official agency business" was not issued until September 2013, months after Clinton had left Foggy Bottom.

But 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.

...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/hillary-clinton-state-department-emails

[napi21]

1. Who says they weren't preserved and turned over to the Natl Archives?

From everything I've hears, 55,000 emails WERE turned over, and those were the ones pertaining to business. I still think this is yet another trail the Benghazi Committee is grasping on to in an effort to justify their existence!

[Rex]

4. Well the GOP will once again find there is no 'there' there. They have nothing on HRC.

I dare say they have yet to realize how many millions of pissed off voters are out here now...pissed at the attempts to cut the ACA. Not all of them are Dems either!

The GOP is a joke, everything they say is taken with a grain of salt by most rational people. If anything, this exposed an issue as to why there is no good IT team working for the SOS when they dole out over 200 million a year for IT!

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

2. Uh oh, time to throw David Corn under the bus!

(Is it actually Corn? For some reason I thought it was spelled Korn?)

But let's face it. Rules or no rules, laws or no laws, what effect this will or will not have will come down to what resonates with potential voters, and what narratives about HRC the revelations will reinforce. Will it change the minds of hardcore pro or anti Hillary folks? Of course not. But it might weaken her appeal to wafflers who believe in sunshine laws, or those who worry about politicians who have already had the narrative going about them that they feel rules don't apply to them, or that what they want to do is more important than what they might be supposed to do. So does it destroy her as a candidate? Of course not. But it might peel away another percent or so of support. The question becomes how many further incidents will be put forward to reinforce the same narrative that has been used against so many politicians over the years.

[Rex]

3. That is interesting! He was thrown under the bus just the other day!

Let's see if the same people do it again!