Critics of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email to conduct official government business are dismissing her tweet late Wednesday calling on the State Department to review the communications for release.
In a tweet circulated at 11:35 p.m., Clinton said: “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review for release as soon as possible.”
But “if she wanted the public to see her email she would have complied with the law in the first place,” Daniel Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, a nonprofit government transparency watchdog, told the Washington Examiner early Thursday.
Epstein noted that Clinton’s failure to use a government email account or to provide contemporaneous copies of her private account communications to the State Department created significant obstacles to assuring the public’s right to see those documents.
“Multiple FOIA lawsuits exist where records will not be produced.Sadly, once the National Archives and Records Administration deposits Hillary Rodham Clinton’s records, they are subject to a signed records disposition schedule which means they are not public until fully processed — and archival records are not subject to FOIA — the public will have to go to NARA to review them,” he said.
Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, told theExaminer Thursday that “Clinton’s tweet could be interpreted to mean that her email wasn’t preserved and retained properly. But it appears that she turned over at least some email.”
But, Amey cautioned, “I still question her use of personal email, the security of that system, and what might be lost or not turned over. The State Department should ensure that all government-related emails have been captured and make them publicly available.”
Tom Fitton, president of the Right-leaning nonprofit watchdog Judicial Watch, simply dismissed Clinton’s tweet, saying it doesn’t change the fact that “her secret email system shows she is afraid of disclosure.”
Fitton’s group has filed a dozen lawsuits challenging State Department responses to Freedom of Information Act requests for copies of Clinton’s documents during her tenure.
The New York Times is reporting Thursday that the private email account used by Clinton was registered by longtime aide Justin Cooper and access to the domain was strictly limited to Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, and her closest State Department aides.
“An aide who had been with the Clintons since the 1990s, Justin Cooper, registered the domain name, clintonemail.com, which had a server linked to the Clintons’ home address in Chappaqua, N.Y. Obtaining an account from that domain became a symbol of status within the family’s inner circle, conferring prestige and closeness to the secretary,” the Times said.
A federal judge has thrown another complication into the legal situation surrounding the Clinton email controversy.
“The law is clear, however, that agencies do not — merely by way of the employer/employee relationship — gain ‘control’ over their employees’ personal email accounts,” U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said. “That is precisely why agencies admonish their employees to use their official accounts for government business.”
Kessler’s ruling came in response to a suit filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Right-leaning think tank, seeking access to private emails used to conduct official business by White House Science Adviser John Holdren, according to Bloomberg Business late Wednesday.
Chris Horner, a CEI senior fellow who in 2012 exposed former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson’s illegal use of a fake email name — “Richard Windsor” — pointed to a footnote in Kessler’s ruling that could have a significant bearing on the outcome of Clinton’s present difficulties.
“In footnote 8 buried on page 18 of 20, which curiously begins “Though not relevant here, …”, Judge Kessler writes, “an email is unlawfully “removed” (even when the agency has a copy) if there is some independent reason why the document should not appear on an unofficial account, such as the presence of classified information.Such ‘removal’ refers to the federal criminal code, Title 18 U.S.C. 2071, making it a felony to remove federal records, punishable by up to three years for each event.”
Clinton “likely knew her decision would become public at some point, and that there would be an unpleasant news cycle. This is typical and apparently accepted practice for the Clintons. If she also considered these implications, it only reaffirms her sense of being above the law. If she didn’t, it only calls into question her judgment that much more,” Horner said.
In a related development,Clinton’s defenders — most notably Media Matters for America founder and Clinton fundraiser David Brock — see nothing wrong with her use of a private email account to conduct official business as America’s chief diplomat.
But Clinton — then a New York senator and candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination — sounded the opposite opinion six years ago when it became known that members of President George W. Bush’s White House staff had been using nongovernment email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee to conduct official business.
“Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts,” Clinton said in a speech before a Take Back America conference in 2007.
“It’s a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok. It is everything our founders were afraid of, everything our Constitution was designed to prevent,” she said. The Daily Caller posted video of the Clinton speech late Wednesday.
This story was first published at 7:24 a.m. and has been updated.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
