Not even the week of Hillary Clinton’s announcement of her presidential candidacy could pass without further revelations emerging on her use of email when she was secretary of state.
We found out this week Congress demanded an accounting of her email habits more than two years ago, but Clinton simply ignored the query. But the reply to the request from the State Department’s legal office revealed Clinton was not in compliance with the department’s guidelines on email usage, which is contrary to her public assertions on the matter.
According to The New York Times, which broke the story, the paper obtained a copy of the letter from U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who then was chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The letter, sent to 17 department heads on Dec. 13, 2012, was part of an investigation by Issa’s committee into the government’s email policies after it had discovered officials involved in the Solyndra scandal had used their own email accounts.
“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Issa asked Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.” Issa also demanded to know the State Department’s policy on personal email.
The response from the State Department’s legal office is interesting considering what we know now. The response, which arrived on March 27, well after Clinton had left office, simply ignored the request for information on her email habits. But the letter from Thomas B. Gibbons, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, did include a description of the department’s email policies:
Employees may use personal email on personal time for matters not directly related to official business, and any employee using personal email should make it clear that his or her personal email is not being used for official business.
This seems pretty clear cut. In other words, “No, State Department personnel may not use personal email for official business.” Yet, here is what Clinton had to say at her press conference on the email business on March 10 of this year in New York.
First, when I got to work as secretary of state, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two … Second, the vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.
Clearly, Clinton’s decision to conduct official business on her private email server located in her own home was in direct contravention of State Department policy. On whose authority did she reach the conclusion that it was allowed? And as we have seen in the Benghazi investigation, it has hampered the efforts to get an accurate picture of her actions at a moment of crisis.
