“When a government hides its work from public view, hands out jobs and money to political cronies, administers unequal justice, looks away as corrupt bureaucrats and businessmen enrich themselves at the people’s expense, that government is failing its citizens,” she said. “And most importantly, that government is failing to earn and hold the trust of its people. And that lack of trust, in a world of instantaneous communication, means that the very fabric of society begins to fray and the foundation of governmental legitimacy begins to crumble.”
Three months later, Clinton’s State Department made several commitments for the U.S. as part of the Open Government Partnership. One was to overhaul how the U.S. government stores and manages its records, to create “a reformed, digital-era, government-wide records management framework that promotes accountability and performance.”
Government transparency experts said Clinton knew when that commitment was made that her own e-mails wouldn’t be included in the framework because she had established her own e-mail domain on a server in her house in Chappaqua, New York.
Danielle Brian, the executive director of the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, told us that Clinton’s 2011 speech “demonstrates extraordinary hypocrisy given that while Clinton was giving this speech she had created essentially a second set of books where her communications were not being captured for the National Archives.”
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