NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Monday, March 2, 2015, 11:22 PM
Updated: Tuesday, March 3, 2015, 12:58 AM
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton used nothing but a personal email account to conduct official business during her four years at the State Department, The New York Times reported Monday.
Clinton’s apparent decision to spurn a “.gov” account, which may have broken rules, meant that sensitive information-sharing and communication with world leaders were conducted through a private, and possibly non-secure, account.
“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,” Jason Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told the Times.
A Clinton spokesman said she complied with the “letter and spirit of the rules,” but refused to explain why she opted for a personal account.
The rep didn’t respond to an email from the Daily News.
The use of unofficial email came to light two weeks ago, after a House committee investigating the 2012 attack on the consulate in Benghazi received 300 of Clinton’s emails from the State Department, the paper reported.
A couple of months before that, aides for the former First Lady went through her correspondence and gave the State Department 55,000 emails to comply with federal record-keeping practices and laws requiring that national records are archived.
The Times said Clinton, who stepped down in 2013, never had a government email and her correspondence wasn’t preserved — despite the requirements of the Federal Records Act.
“Personal emails are not secure,” Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a government transparency advocacy group, was quoted as saying. “Senior officials should not be using them.”
The digital delinquency immediately sparked online reactions, with comments from both sides of the aisle slamming Clinton’s apparent flouting of rules — and wondering how the lack of an official email address didn’t come to light until now.
Many noted the Clintons’ longtime penchant for secrecy, and some described the revelation as “shocking” and worse.
Jeb Bush, a potential, and at the moment potent, 2016 Republican presidential candidate, has recently released emails from his eight years as Florida’s governor. He tweeted a link to that database Monday and called on Clinton release hers.
“Transparency matters,” he wrote.
Other online users took a less pointed approach, speculating on which online provider Clinton used — AOL? Yahoo? — and what her exact email address was.
Two years ago, Gawker reported that Clinton was receiving emails at the domain clintonemail.com that was registered via Network Solutions, according to hacked information.
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