If you work for the federal government, you are assigned a government e-mail account and you are to use that account for the conduct of all government business. That applies to everyone from the lowest-level employee up to cabinet secretaries and even the president himself, not only because it's a basic practice of just about any employer but also because it allows your e-mails to be easily archived, accessed and referenced for the purposes or record-keeping and transparency.
There are no exceptions. Unless, of course, you are Hillary Clinton. Because if you are Hillary Clinton, doing your job as Secretary of State is not your primary objective. Positioning yourself to run for president is your primary objective, and you can't have these pesky archivists just accessing your government e-mail account and possibly finding things that are not helpful to your presidential ambitions. So for you, Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point does it make what the rules say?
You will not use a government e-mail account. You will use a private account. For all government business. The rules be damned. Because you are Hillary Clinton, and your presidential ambitions are too important to be complicated by rules made for the little people but not for you. So you won't. And she didn't:
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.
“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.
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.
Nick Merrill's comment is classic Hillary. She's blatantly and obviously in violation of the rules, but you simply declare regardless that she is complying with the "letter and spirit of the rules". Because hey. You can. Everyone knows it's not true, but what are they going to do about it?
Give credit to the New York Times, which we rip to shreds on a regular basis around here, for reporting on this. Generally speaking I think the poltical press obsesses too much over administrative rules like this. But this case is an interesting test both for the media and for Hillary's defenders. The media always celebrate and demand transparency for Democrats and Republicans alike because it's for their benefit, and while they're more willing to cover up for Democrats, they still don't like it when politicians engage in secrecy.
This is about as flagrant an exercise in secrecy as you'll find from a public official. How is it that the new Secretary of State tells the IT department, when it shows up to set up her new official State Department e-mail account, "No thanks, I won't be using that, I'll use my own"? Surely there were lots of people who knew this was contrary to established procedure, and I'm sure some of them knew it was blatantly illegal. But no one was about to question the queen. I don't know if Obama (who does use a government e-mail, on a secure server) knew about it, but surely his top staff did. They probably figured they needed to keep Hillary happy to avoid trouble, and that this wasn't a big enough issue to risk pissing her off over.
The bottom line is that Hillary does not believe the rules apply to her if they present any sort of threat whatsoever to her political ambitions. This is the same woman who demands in her speaking engagements that all questions be pre-screened and pre-approved, and insists on controlling the on-stage environment even up to and including the style of the chairs and where they are placed. Why would anyone be surprised that a control freak like this would want total control of her e-mail correspondences, even though they were official government business and they belonged to the people and not to her.
But that's the problem as Hillary sees it. The government is supposed to belong to her, because that's owed to her, and it's her turn. Today her e-mail account, tomorrow the queendom.
I will wait with bated breath to see if anyone ever forces her to answer about this. Come to think of it, I had better not hold my breath because Hillary is not worth suffocating over.
