Advocates of greater transparency and accountability in the federal government blasted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Tuesday for using a private email account to conduct official business during the four years she was the nation’s chief diplomat.
“The use of personal email is a strategic and intentional way for the former secretary to avoid transparency from Congress and the media,” said Daniel Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action. “Further, this act of secrecy by the former secretary raises serious questions given the numerous ethics concerns raised about Mrs. Clinton’s role as a cabinet official, as well as a political candidate.”
Similarly, Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, said Clinton’s use of a private email account instead of an official State Department account causes him to “worry about whether this is intentional to get around transparency laws.Here, this administration came in with the promise of openness and integrity and here it just seems as if there are multiple instances where there’s been ethics concerns.”
Amey also pointed to concerns about digital security when a private email account is used by a government official:”I think there are security concerns if these emails contained information, either classified or sensitive information, that should have been protected, and they were conducted off the grid.”
He added that “timing matters here. How soon were these records preserved and turned over to the State Department?”
Electronic Freedom Frontier Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo called Clinton’s private email use “a shocking violation of protocol, a violation of public records law, and a possibly huge security risk. The State Department says Clinton never put classified documents in email, but the claim that she never referenced classified information in any form over email isn’t credible.”
Clinton’s private email use was first reported late Monday by the New York Times after it was discovered by investigators for the House Select Committee on Benghazi in its probe of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.
The committee has received copies of approximately 300 of the Clinton emails, but they were screened by State Department officials before being given to the congressional panel. That means the panel cannot know if it is being given all of the emails that are relevant to its probe of the Benghazi tragedy in which four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered by Islamic terrorists.
Clinton is not the first secretary of state to use a nongovernment email to conduct official diplomatic business but she is the first to be covered by federal regulations that require officials to preserve all such communications for the National Archives and Records Administration.
The Times quoted Jason R. Baron, the former litigation director of the archives, who said “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.” Baron is now an attorney at the Drinker Biddle and Reath firm.
Clinton is also not unique among President Obama’s appointees in violating those regulations, according to Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He pointed to revelations in 2011 that Lisa Jackson, then-administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, had used both a private email account and a fake government account under the name of “Richard Windsor” to conduct official government business.
As the Washington Examiner reported in 2013, “Richard Windsor” even won agency awards for completing ethics training courses in 2010, 2011 and 2012.
That discovery, Horner said, “set off a chain of revelations, including the fact that several EPA regional administrators and current assistant administrator for air and radiation Janet McCabe, used private email accounts for work-related correspondence.”:
Horner also pointed toformer Department of Energy’s Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Cathy Zoi’s use of a private email account from her prior work with the Alliance for Climate Protection, an environmental activist group associated with former Vice President Al Gore.
The National Security Archives’ Director Thomas Blanton told the Times that”someone in the State Department deserves credit for taking the initiative to ask for the records back. Most of the time it takes the threat of litigation and embarrassment.”
This latest flap comes hard on the heels of revelations in recent weeks by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times, as well as the Examiner last July that the Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars in contributions from foreign governments, corporations and individuals while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
Those contributions and speeches delivered by President Clinton before foreign interests were to be reviewed for potential conflicts of interest under a 2008 memorandum agreement between the foundation and then-President-elect Obama’s transition team.
Those reviews weren’t always conducted and even when they were, questions were often raised about real or apparent conflicts.
Washington Examiner watchdog reporter Sarah Westwood contributed to this report.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
