The news cycle has been flooded today with the news that Hillary Clinton, while serving as Secretary of State, used a private email address.
Folks have shrieked far and wide that this was somehow a breach of security or detour from normal day to day behavior.
Except – it wasn’t. Turns out the laws on email use didn’t change until 2013, after her tenure at SOS.
From the very conservative Wall Street Journal:
Federal laws and regulations on preserving government records only recently have begun to catch up with how U.S. officials communicate, a fact highlighted by the public stir over Hillary Clinton ’s private email use as secretary of state.
The Federal Records Act requires government agencies to preserve records documenting the “organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures and essential transactions” of an agency’s business. But it was only last year that Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, a law with a series of modern-day changes to improve recordkeeping and preservation.
The 2014 overhaul, which postdates Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, placed explicit limits on agency officials using private email accounts for official business. The new law said agency officials can’t create or send a government record on a private account unless they also copy or forward the email to their official government email address.
The National Archives and Records Administration in September 2013 issued guidance to federal agencies that said federal employees generally shouldn’t use personal email accounts to conduct official business, except in limited situations, such as during emergencies when an official may not be able to access an official account.
That 2013 guidance, which also postdated Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, replaced a 2008 memo on federal recordkeeping that didn’t specifically address email records.
Mrs. Clinton turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department but only after they were requested in October of last year. That appears to have been a belated effort by the department to comply with the 2009 regulations. Mrs. Clinton supplied the email records in December.
“Both the letter and spirit of the rules permitted State Department officials to use nongovernment email, as long as appropriate records were preserved,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said.
A State Department spokeswoman said the agency was in the process of updating its records preservation policies to bring them in line with the 2013 National Archives guidance. “We have no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal email account for anything but unclassified purposes,” the spokeswoman added.
