Hillary Clinton claimed on Tuesday that she relied on private email while secretary of state “as a matter of convenience,” because she didn’t want to carry around two devices — one for personal email, and one for work email. One of her central defenses of this practice was that a “vast majority” of her emails were to government employees and were therefore archived anyway.
Clinton’s office, in a statement that followed her press conference, offered a little more detail on this point, explaining, “To address requirements to keep records of her work emails, it was her practice to email government officials on their ‘.gov’ accounts. That way, they would be immediately captured and preserved in the Department’s system.”
So in other words, her defense is dependent on her subordinates following proper protocol by using their work email accounts. But, if others in the department followed her lead, they would have been using private email for the sake of “convenience.” And if that were the case, Clinton wouldn’t have “.gov” accounts to email and those emails wouldn’t have been archived by the department. Put another way, her defense is contingent on others acting differently than she did. The implicit suggestion is that using government email addresses was the right thing to do.
Thus, one of the key defenses she’s offered isn’t much of a defense — unless Clinton wants to assert that as secretary of state she had the special privilege to put her own convenience over proper policy while others did not.
