Kerry Picket has an interesting piece over at the Daily Caller on yet another Obama administration official who used a private, unsecured email account (although not a server in his own home) to send sensitive information and communicate with foreign governments.
Johnson used his private email to conduct sensitive discussions with high level foreign officials, including conversations he had with a Kuwaiti ambassador and Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry officials.
This isn’t exactly a major scandal, but former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was not alone. A previous FOIA request by Judicial Watch revealed that 28 DHS officials had at least sometimes used private, web-based email for official government work.
It isn’t always illegal for federal employees to use private email. But maybe it’s about time it should be. There are a lot of strict rules about it already that are violated routinely. The government has a legitimate interest in discouraging the practice, based on both the need to retain government records for FOIA requests and obviously the handling of classified information. Federal employees are already required to make any private emails about government business available for FOIA requests, but as Hillary Clinton’s sage showed, this is more theory than practice.
And it isn’t just about Clinton — in fact, it isn’t a partisan issue, either. Other Cabinet officials in the Obama era were busted using private email, as were political employees in the Bush administration.
Lisa Jackson, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator, resigned after revelations about both her use of private email and a secret government email address under the pseudonym “Richard Windsor.” (The EPA spent at least three years resisting FOIA requests pertaining to the latter, at one point claiming that it would literally take a century to produce all the responsive records.) IRS officials embroiled in the 2013 targeting scandal were caught discussing by email their use of instant messaging software that doesn’t preserve their communications for FOIA.
Congress has a lot on its plate right now, as does President Trump. But it might be a good time to discuss new, government-wide standards for communication between federal employees about government business. It’s obviously become a real problem, and the current ambiguous “honor-system” rules just aren’t being honored.
