It is becoming a common theme of the Obama administration, the use of private email accounts to conduct official government business. It is obvious that the intent is to avoid the law that requires transparency and accountability in government.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the latest cabinet member past or present to be caught using unauthorized and even illegal email accounts to circumvent the law she swore to uphold.
Federal law does require government officials and in particular high government officials such as the secretary of state to use official and secure channels of communications and it further requires the retention of those communications to include letters, phone calls and emails.
A congressional committee has been seeking Mrs. Clinton’s emails as part of its investigation into the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, in 2012.
There is some ambiguity in the law in regard to email and it is unclear if Mrs. Clinton has broken the specific letter of the law in using non governmental email accounts. Mrs. Clinton’s office issued a statement justifying the questionable and most likely illegal practice.
In the statement, her office stated that “both the letter and spirit’’ of rules regarding emails allowed State Department officials to use non-government accounts, as long as “appropriate records’’ were preserved.
Mrs. Clinton used her own email account when engaging with State Department officials, it said. “For government business, she emailed them on their department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained,’’ the statement said.
What the statement did not address is that Mrs. Clinton retains control of what emails are released even when they are retained, which was the case in the Benghazi assault. Her office turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department in December in response to a department request, but those emails were not the complete total of emails.
Read more:
The story in the Wall Street Journal
