By: Michael Schmidt (The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email
account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State
Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements
that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s
record.
Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her
four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to
have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as
required by the Federal Records Act.
It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department
effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs.
Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal
emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All
told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department.Mrs. Clinton
stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.
Her
expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former
National Archives and Records Administration officials and government
watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.
The existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered
as a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate
in Benghazi sought correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and her aides
about the attack.
“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,” said Jason R. Baron, a
lawyer at Drinker Biddle and Reath who is a former director of
litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the
personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter
and spirit of the rules.”
Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received
by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered
government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional
committees, historians and members of the news media can find them.
There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive
material
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