Media

Read the full story: Politico

During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, department officials pushed to limit the number of emails and other electronic records the agency was required to save under federal rules.

 

In a March 2012 memo responding to a call from President Barack Obama to improve federal record keeping, State’s top records manager urged streamlining the rules so that much of the routine back-and-forth of government would be beyond their reach.

 

“The vast majority of working files are of short-term value and should be disposed of quickly. In the modern era, most drafts and various other working products are circulated for comments and approvals through email or on other collaborative electronic sites,” State Records Officer Tasha Thian wrote. “Under [the National Archives and Records Administration’s] overly broad view of what constitutes a record, essentially all working materials would fall under the definition of a record, many of which are not of long-term value once the final product is completed. This results in added costs.”…

 

“She’s basically recommending that the State Department should have a lot more discretion in terms of how it preserves records. We now have really good evidence what that means is: ‘We don’t want to preserve records,’” said Cause of Action’s Dan Epstein. “That’s a recipe for violating the Federal Records Act and avoiding transparency statutes like the Freedom of Information Act.”

 

Epstein pointed to the department’s disclosure last week that it did not begin automatically archiving official email accounts of top agency leaders until recently — in most instances, just last month. The move came about six months after agency officials were advised that Clinton’s use of a private email account was likely to complicate responses to document requests from a House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks.

Read the full story: Politico

A coalition of openness, historical and journalistic organizations is asking the State Department and the National Archives to attempt to retrieve digital copies of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails.

 

In a letter sent Tuesday to current Secretary of State John Kerry and Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, the groups complain that Clinton jeopardized the integrity of important government records by conducting her official business on a private email account and returning selected emails—in response to a State Department request—almost two years after leaving office.

 

“The manner in which the former Secretary’s emails were segregated from and only later returned to the State Department can set a dangerous precedent for future agency appointees,” the groups wrote in their letter (posted here). “Because it is of the utmost importance that all of former Secretary Clinton’s emails are properly preserved and transferred back to the State Department for accountability and historical record purposes, we are asking that you verify that Secretary Clinton’s emails containing federal records are transferred to the Department of State in their original electronic form, so that all such emails may be accessible pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.”

Read the full story: Washington Examiner

A broad-based coalition of non-profit advocates for greater transparency and accountability in the federal asked Secretary of State John Kerry and Archivist of the United States David Fierro to make publicly available in electronic format all of Hillary Clinton’s private emails dealing with official business.

 

“Because it is of the utmost importance that all of former Secretary Clinton’s emails are properly preserved and transferred back to the State Department for accountability and historical record purposes, we are asking that you verify that Secretary Clinton’s emails containing federal records are transferred to the Department of State in their original electronic form, so that all such emails may be accessible pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act,” the coalition said in a letter to the officials.

 

The coalition includes Cause of Action, Defending Dissent Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, MuckRock, National Coalition for History, National Security Archive, National Security Counselors, OpenTheGovernment.org, Pirate Times, Project on Government Oversight, Society of Professional Journalists and the Sunlight Foundation.

Read the full story: Daily Caller 

A bipartisan coalition of government transparency advocates is asking that the State Department to ensure that all of Hillary Clinton’s emails pertaining to official government business are turned over to the agency.

 

A dozen watchdog groups sent a letter on Tuesday to Sec. of State John Kerry and National Archivist David Ferreiro asking them to “verify that Secretary Clinton’s emails containing federal records are transferred to the Department of State in their original electronic form, so that all such emails may be accessible pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.”

 

The letter comes during Sunshine Week, an annual event in which advocates for open government push for greater transparency.

March 16, 2015, 12:24 p.m. EDT

Three transparency laws Hillary may have violated: Column

By: Dan Epstein

Six years ago today, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a memo on the Freedom of Information Act to the entire Department of State. It stated that “Preserving the record of our deliberations, decisions, and actions will be at the foundation of our efforts to promote openness.”

So much for that. Today, we know that Clinton took extraordinary steps to prevent any record of her “deliberations, decisions, and actions.” During her entire tenure as Secretary of State, she exclusively utilized a private email account run through servers located at her home in Chappaqua, New York. This arrangement prevented the federal government from maintaining any record of her email communications — a slap in the face to anyone who cares about government transparency and an obvious example of hypocrisy given the memo Clinton sent to her staff in 2009.

Clinton has since attempted to address this crisis of transparency by selectively releasing the emails which she claims pertained to her work as Secretary of State. Of the 62,320 emails she has admitted to sending between 2009 and 2013, she has handed over 30,490 — in the form of 55,000 printed pages which may have been edited — to the Department of State. The remaining emails — nearly 32,000 — were apparently destroyed.

This raises obvious questions about whether the former first lady broke federal law. So far, she may have violated at least three laws.

First, she may have violated the Federal Records Act. Even in 2009, this law required Clinton to “ensure that Federal records sent or received” on her private email “are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system.” Clinton claims to have fulfilled this law by turning over 55,000 pages of emails to the Department of State, but the full truth cannot be known until and unless investigators are able to access her private email server. The penalties for violating the Federal Records Act include fines, jail time or disqualification from holding any office under the United States.

The second law Clinton may have violated is Section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which forbids federal employees from retaining classified information in an unauthorized manner — such as in a personal email. A 2009 Executive Order by President Barack Obama has a similar ban on such activity. Clinton has sought to address this problem by claiming that her emails never dealt with classified information, yet this is highly unlikely given her role as Secretary of State.

And finally, Clinton may have violated the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). By utilizing a private email server beyond the control of the State Department, her email records will never be subject to FOIA requests — the most basic tool in keeping Washington transparent. In fact, Clinton may have used a private email server precisely to evade FOIA.

Given Clinton’s intransigence and unwillingness to give investigators access to her private email server, we cannot yet know with full certainty whether she broke these three laws. Fortunately, it is still possible for government watchdogs to obtain relevant records and information that shed light on this issue.

On March 9, Cause of Action — the legal advocacy group for which I am executive director — sent three unique Freedom of Information Act requests to the Department of State, the Department of State Inspector General and the National Archives and Records Administration. Our FOIA requests seek records that may contain answers to five specific questions:

1. Why did the State Department allow Clinton to use personal devices for official agency business in the first place?
2. Did Clinton attend training on the proper preservation of records?
3. Once Clinton’s use of a private email account was discovered, did the federal government seek to preserve the records in her possession?
4. Was Clinton ever investigated by the inspector general or another federal agency for her email practices?
5. And did the National Archives and Records Administration know about Secretary Clinton’s emails? If so, why did they not inform Congress, as required by federal law?

The public deserves answers to these important questions — they will give us a more accurate picture of the actions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account. We may not have the answers now, but one thing is still certain: she did not fulfill her own promise as Secretary of State to preserve “the record of our deliberations, decisions, and actions.” Then again, she may never have received that memo in the first place — it might have gone to her non-existent .gov account.

Dan Epstein is the executive director of Cause of Action.