[kictanet] Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules

[S.M. Muraya]

The Kenya ICT Authority has an tender for E-Mail Management Services (for
all Ministries). It does not seem limited to firms owned and controlled by
Kenyans, factoring the sensitivity involved in handling e-mail records
(archives).

Electronic (e-mail, video, audio) records might be factored in the National
Archives and Documentation Service Act (Revised 2012) by these words

... “records” includes not only written records, but records
conveying information by any means whatsoever; ...


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clintons-use-of-private-email-at-state-department-raises-flags.html?_r=0

*Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly
Breaking Rules*

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTMARCH 2, 2015

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.

“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 & 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 materials.

Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official — or first secretary of
state — to use a personal email account on which to conduct official
business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work,
appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is
supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an
agency’s computer server is not working.

“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a
high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal
email account for the transaction of government business,” said Mr. Baron,
who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.

Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the
time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be
preserved as part of the agency’s records.

But Mrs. Clinton and her aides failed to do so.

How many emails were in Mrs. Clinton’s account is not clear, and neither is
the process her advisers used to determine which ones related to her work
at the State Department before turning them over.

“It’s a shame it didn’t take place automatically when she was secretary of
state as it should have,” said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the
National Security Archive, a group based at George Washington University
that advocates government transparency. “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.”

Mr. Blanton said high-level officials should operate as President Obama
does, emailing from a secure government account, with every record
preserved for historical purposes.

“Personal emails are not secure,” he said. “Senior officials should not be
using them.”

Penalties for not complying with federal record-keeping requirements are
rare, because the National Archives has few enforcement abilities.

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, declined to detail why she had
chosen to conduct State Department business from her personal account. He
said that because Mrs. Clinton had been sending emails to other State
Department officials at their government accounts, she had “every
expectation they would be retained.” He did not address emails that Mrs.
Clinton may have sent to foreign leaders, people in the private sector or
government officials outside the State Department.

The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding
criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former
President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward
secrecy.

And others who, like Mrs. Clinton, are eyeing a candidacy for the White
House are stressing a very different approach. Jeb Bush, who is seeking the
Republican nomination for president, released a trove of emails in December
from his eight years as governor of Florida.

It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton’s private email account included
encryption or other security measures, given the sensitivity of her
diplomatic activity.

Mrs. Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, has used a
government email account since taking over the role, and his correspondence
is being preserved contemporaneously as part of State Department records,
according to his aides.

Before the current regulations went into effect, Secretary of State Colin
L. Powell, who served from 2001 to 2005, used personal email to communicate
with American officials and ambassadors and foreign leaders.

Last October, the State Department, as part of the effort to improve its
record keeping, asked all previous secretaries of state dating back to
Madeleine K. Albright to provide it with any records, like emails, from
their time in office for preservation.

“These steps include regularly archiving all of Secretary Kerry’s emails to
ensure that we are capturing all federal records,” said a department
spokeswoman, Jen Psaki.

The existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered by a
House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in
Benghazi as it sought correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and her aides
about the attack.
Two weeks ago, the State Department, after reviewing Mrs. Clinton’s emails,
provided the committee with about 300 emails — amounting to roughly 900
pages — about the Benghazi attacks.

Mrs. Clinton and the committee declined to comment on the contents of the
emails or whether they will be made public.

The State Department, Ms. Psaki said, “has been proactively and
consistently engaged in responding to the committee’s many requests in a
timely manner, providing more than 40,000 pages of documents, scheduling
more than 20 transcribed interviews and participating in several briefings
and each of the committee’s hearings.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 3, 2015, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Clinton Used Personal Email at
State Dept.. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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