Now that Hillary Clinton has been found using a private email server to conduct official government business while acting as secretary of state between 2009 and 2013, she has responded to the recent revelations on Twitter, saying that she plans to release her entire email archives to the public.
Clinton to reveal all
As it stands, state officials are of course expected to use official email accounts in office, for security and transparency reasons, but instead Clinton breached those rules and used a personal account from a private email server in order to communicate with colleagues, world leaders and others. Clinton has already provided more than 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department, but there are likely to be many more as-yet-unseen emails.
State Department to review emails
The State Department in turn responded to Clinton’s tweet with a statement, that said the release of the emails will take some time – before such a release, government emails are checked for classified or confidential information.
“The State Department will review for public release the emails provided by Secretary Clinton to the Department, using a normal process that guides such releases. We will undertake this review as soon as possible; given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete.”
The tweet Clinton sent provides reassurances that she is being transparent on the matter, though it does not explain why she decided to setup her own server in the first instance. State officials in the past have also been caught out using public email services like Gmail to conduct government business. However, Clinton appears to have gone a step further by setting up a private server that was registered to her home address and used exclusively for four years or so.
Letter and spirit of the rules
A Clinton spokesperson said that she followed the “letter and spirit of the rules,” but policy experts have been critical of her flagrant disregard for the rules in force. “I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business”, said Jason Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, in a statement to The New York Times.
Larry Banks is a keen follower of technology and finance. He has worked for a variety of online publications, writing about a diverse range of topics including mobile networks, patents, and Internet video delivery technologies.
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