How Hillary Clinton may have violated government rules on e-mails

This rule is clear: if Clinton used personal email to conduct official business—which apparently did not violate any federal rules at the time—all of those emails had to be collected and preserved within the State Department’s recordkeeping system. That makes sense: the whole point of preserving official records of government business is to have this material controlled by the government, not by the individual official or employee. Yet in this case, Clinton and her aides apparently did not preserve all her emails within the system.

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Asked whether her emails were kept within Foggy Bottom’s system, her spokesman Nick Merrill replied with a terse email, “They were. State can speak to this.” He did not respond to an email requesting further details. And when I asked the State Department if Clinton’s emails were preserved, an official replied with a statement from deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf: “The State Department has long had access to a wide array of Secretary Clinton’s records—including emails between her and Department officials with state.gov accounts.” This did not address the question at hand: were all her emails preserved within the department’s system? Finally, I heard from another State Department official who explained on background that the department had preserved someof Clinton’s emails, given that her emails to and from others within the State Department (at their official email accounts) had been kept within the system. Still, official-business emails Clinton sent to and received from people outside the State Department were not captured and preserved by the department’s system in real time.

The State Department has had to rely upon Clinton and her aides to ensure it now has a complete record of her emails. Last October, the department asked secretaries of state going back to Madeleine Albright if any possessed material that should be within the agency’s records system. Within weeks, Clinton handed in those 55,000 pages of email. Her team cites this as an act of transparency on her part. But one need not be a conspiracy theorist to note that there’s no telling if she and her aides hung on to certain emails they did not want to share. In law enforcement parlance, the chain of custody has been tainted.

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