Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Address For State Department Job, Breaking Rules

While this is a big story, as broken by the New York Times, appearing in the Washington Post, Fox News, others, and a big pull at Memeorandum, how many are surprised in the least by this news, and are thinking about it in the same internal voice that says “plain cereal for breakfast? OK”?

Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account 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.

Read that again: “did not have a government email address during her 4 year stint at State”. I bet anyone who joined a company that uses email had their own address within a week, and was expressly told to not use any personal email for official company business.

I’d love to know what the address ending was. The Washington Post article seems to believe it was “clintonemail.com”. How much fun would it be if she was using an AOL or hotmail account?

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.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Actually, in the age of Obama, where multiple appointed department heads and other employees used personal email accounts to conduct official business, it’s easy to conceive of the scenario. One which would get a private sector company in Very Big Trouble under Sarbanes Oxley and other federal law.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

Even though it was a “severe ethical breach”, and possibly a breach of government rules regarding record keeping, I can’t really get worked up over this, because it is entirely expected within The Most Transparent Administration Eveh!

However, since the emails were not automatically archived, the emails were taken manually, and, in regards to the Benghazi period, how many were actually turned over to the House committee that is still trying to get to the root of what happened?

The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.

It is interesting that Mr. Obama is not mentioned, considering his lack of transparency and inclination towards secrecy.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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16 Responses to “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Address For State Department Job, Breaking Rules”

  1. Dana says:

    The New York Times headline was “Possibly Breaking Rules,” but if it had been a Republican, it would have been “Breaking The Law!

    Let’s be clear about this: Secretary Clinton didn’t just “break the rules,” but she, and her aides, broke the law!

    There is no way on God’s earth that the foreign service officers working in the Secretary’s office didn’t have her secure e-mail account set up and ready to go on her very first day; that is what they were required to do, under standard procedures. There is no way that all of the legal people in the State Department didn’t tell the Secretary that she was in violation of the law.

  2. Dana says:

    And it has to be asked: why would the Secretary of State deliberately choose to break the law? Her minions would have had her secure government e-mail account set up, complete with whatever procedures were necessary for her to use it, so it wouldn’t have been any additional work for her. She had to go out of her way to use the private account, and we ought to know why. This stupid bitch dedicated former Secretary of State thinks that she ought to be the next President of the United States, and she ought to tell us why she deliberately evaded having her e-mails recorded and stored, as required by the law, before people see her name up for election.

    Moreover, she sent out thousands and thousands of e-mails — the NYT states that there were 55,000 pages, though not the number of individual e-mails — and many of them had to have gone to other State Department employees, who also had to have known that she should have been using the State Department’s secure server, but didn’t.

  3. Dana says:

    Finally, the NYT story tells us that her “aides” have been going through her e-mails, deciding which ones to submit for public record; why does Mrs Clinton get to decide what is important to the government and what is not? We might not be all that interested if she shared a recipe or a LOLcats file or a family solution for getting stains out of blue dresses, but if they are not all turned over, how can we have any confidence that she isn’t attempting to hide something incriminating?

    Of course, for the left, none of this will matter. They have long known that she is dishonest, and still don’t care.

  4. Dana says:

    There’s something just completely appropriate about the fact that the Secretary of State in an administration which believes that Islamic terrorism should be fought through law enforcement means rather than just killing them all stone-cold graveyard dead would be breaking the law herself.

  5. Dana says:

    For the Clintons, both of them — we don’t know about their lovely daughter yet — if it’s a choice between doing something honestly and cheating, they’ll pick cheating every time! They would rather tell a lie than the truth, even if the truth doesn’t hurt them and the lie doesn’t help them.

  6. Dana says:

    Among the people who looked the other way are the President of the United States and the Attorney General. Unless you believe that Secretary Clinton never either emailed nor was sent an email by the White House or the Department of Justice, and that neither Justice nor the White House knew her email address, then they knew she was using an illegal e-mail address as well. The Times article tells us that President Obama emails from a secure government account, with every record preserved for historical purposes, so this isn’t somehow a strange system to the White House.

  7. Dana says:

    Mrs Clinton’s minions have gone through all of her emails, and, according to the Times article, “decided which ones to turn over to the State Department.” I’m old enough to remember when The Washington Post and The New York Times and every Democrat — and not a few Republicans — were frothing at the mouth over the “eighteen-minute gap.” I’m expecting nothing more than crickets chirping over this one.

  8. Jeffery says:

    Dana,

    Wasn’t it the NY Times that just broke this story?

    The State Department reports that Sec of State John Kerry is the first Secretary to primarily use .gov email.

    Why didn’t we hear about this with Alexander Haig, George Schultz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice.

    Oh, that’s right. Mrs. Clinton is the most likely Democratic candidate for President.

    Wait for it… Benghazi!!

  9. drowningpuppies says:

    Little jeffery,

    Could it be accepting $500,000 from Algeria while SecState and not reporting it?

  10. Casey says:

    Jeffy, you got links to back that up?

    No, really, I’m serious. One thing I’ve learned about the past few years is that Fed employees are expected to use government accounts for their communications.

    …On the other hand, most of the names you throw out are from two or three decades ago. Haig? Schultz? Really? Albright, maybe.

    But still, links would be nice.

    P.S. Remember the Palin email “scandal?” Anyone want to lay odds jeffey would go totally ape-shit if that happened today? But for Hillary, at this point what difference does it make?

  11. Jeffery says:

    Cassie,

    http://www.capradio.org/news/npr/story?storyid=390429337

    The story is putting new scrutiny on the email habits of top government officials — particularly as a separate report has emerged that during his tenure at the Department of Defense, former Secretary Chuck Hagel did not have an official email account.

    That’s what Vice reporter Jason Leopold says he was told last November, after he filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking Hagel’s records.

    Rules governing government officials’ use of email have evolved in recent years, including part of Clinton’s tenure from January of 2009 to February of 2013.

    The department says it is updating its records preservation policies, taking steps that include regularly archiving all of Secretary John Kerry’s emails.

    “For some historical context,” says deputy spokesperson Marie Harf, “Secretary Kerry is the first secretary of state to rely primarily on a state.gov email account.”

  12. Dana says:

    Jeffrey asked:

    Why didn’t we hear about this with Alexander Haig, George Schultz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice.

    Oh, maybe because there was no such thing during the terms of some of them, and it wasn’t the law during the terms of others. From the Times story:

    Before the current regulations went into effect, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who served from 2001 to 2005, used personal email to communicate with American officials and ambassadors and foreign leaders.

    Note that: before the current regulations went into effect! Only Condoleeza Rice served as Secretary of State prior to Mrs Clinton who would have been covered by the law. The Times story makes no mention at all of any attempt by Dr Rice to evade the law.

  13. Jeffery says:

    Dana,

    The State Dept spokesperson claims Secretary Kerry was the first to use gov email regularly. So, Secretary Rice may have also been a lawbreaker. But she was a media darling AND a Republican. The media have always hated the vile Clintons.

  14. Dana says:

    Jeffrey quoted:

    The story is putting new scrutiny on the email habits of top government officials — particularly as a separate report has emerged that during his tenure at the Department of Defense, former Secretary Chuck Hagel did not have an official email account.

    That’s what Vice reporter Jason Leopold says he was told last November, after he filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking Hagel’s records.

    One would think that Secretary Hagel would also have been in violation of the law, then, except that the source is Jason Leopold. Mr Leopold is the former truthout.org reporter who told us that Karl Rove was going to be indicted. Mr Leopold was a supposedly talented reporter, but he got fired from every reputable place he worked:

    As we learned last week, Rove isn’t being indicted, and the supposed Truthout scoop by reporter Jason Leopold was wildly off the mark. It was but the latest installment in the tale of a troubled young reporter with a history of drug addiction whose aggressive disregard for the rules ended up embroiling me in a bizarre escapade — and raised serious questions about journalistic ethics.

    In his nine-year reporting career, Leopold has managed, despite his drug abuse and a run-in with the law, to work with such big-time news organizations as the Los Angeles Times, Dow Jones Newswire and Salon. He broke some bona fide stories on the Enron scandal and the CIA leak investigation. But in every job, something always went wrong, and he got the sack. Finally, he landed at Truthout, a left-leaning Web site.

    Mr Leopold is a drug addict and a wholly unreliable source.

  15. Dana says:

    Jeffrey wrote:

    The State Dept spokesperson claims Secretary Kerry was the first to use gov email regularly. So, Secretary Rice may have also been a lawbreaker. But she was a media darling AND a Republican. The media have always hated the vile Clintons.

    It depends upon when the law went into effect; it was obviously after Dr Rice became Secretary. And what does the term “regularly” mean? Does it mean that Dr Rice broke the law, by using private e-mails after the law went into effect, or does it mean that she didn’t use e-mail much at all?

    And the media hated the Clintons? You’ve got to be kidding! At one point, CNN was derisively referred to as the Clinton News Network, they were such sycophants!

  16. Dana says:

    Of course, it’s also true that CNN was once the All OJ, All The Time network.

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