By Jeremy Diamond and Elise Labott, CNN
(CNN) Hillary Clinton's email
use is under the microscope after reports revealed that Clinton exclusively
used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state.
Clinton not only skipped out
on getting a State Department email account, but used a private email server
registered to her home address, which gave her and her aides more control over
her email records.
Republicans didn't skip a
beat, spending the week hammering the presumptive frontrunner for the
Democratic presidential nomination over her secretive email habits as the news
cycle mushroomed.
But did Clinton do anything
wrong? Or has this become an overblown saga?
Did Clinton break any State
Department rules?
As of now, there's no evidence
that Clinton violated any State Department rules. But there's a chance she did.
There's no outright ban at the
State Department on using a personal email address to conduct official
government business.
But a 2005 State Department
policy on "sensitive but unclassified information" explains that
employees should conduct "normal day-to-day operations" through the
State Department's official email system to protect the security of the emails'
contents.
Clinton has now handed over
55,000 emails stemming from her duties as the U.S.'s chief diplomat, but there
is no evidence yet that Clinton disclosed that type of sensitive information in
those emails. That's because they have yet to be released.
Is the State Department
looking into whether Clinton violated that policy?
Nope. State Department
officials will comb through the 55,000 emails Clinton and her aides submitted
to the department for review, but
only to determine which emails should be publicly released in accordance
with federal open records laws.
If she did, though, it wasn't
just an oversight by Clinton and her aides, but any high-ranking official she
exchanged emails with, who would have all seen that they were exchanging emails
with Clinton's personal address.
Is there a precedent? Did her
predecessors use private email?
They did. Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice both had personal email accounts during their time at the helm
of the State Department.
Powell also used personal
email to communicate with ambassadors, foreign ministers and his own State
Department staff. He also had and used an official State Department email,
though.
Rice also had both a State
account and personal email address, but one of her aides told CNN that the
former secretary of state "rarely used email during her tenure at
State." And when she did, "her State email was the vehicle for
official communication. She did not use personal email for official
communication as secretary," the aide said.
And Rice's rare use of email
may reveal why the Clinton email saga is a much bigger deal. Email is much more
widely used today, especially by high-ranking officials, than it was when Rice
became secretary of state ten years ago.
Is there a double standard
here?
That's definitely the point
Democrats are trying to make.
But while Powell may have used
his personal email address to conduct State Department business, he also used a
State Department account, which Clinton did not.
Beyond that, though, Clinton
also used an email account that fed through its own server -- unlike a personal
email account that goes through a service like Gmail or Yahoo, for example -- according
to an Associated Press report.
And that's what's most
eyebrow-raising.
Housing her email exchanges on
her own server gave Clinton a lot more control over the fate of that
correspondence. Clinton could have permanently deleted emails, for example.
There's no evidence that she
did, but Republicans are up in arms over the revelations as they continue their
investigation into the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi -- which
happened under Clinton's watch. The House select committee leading that
investigation on Wednesday subpoenaed Clinton's emails related to the attack.
So with her own server, did
she also got to handpick which emails went to the State Department for public
release, right?
That's right, she and her
aides made those calls.
But when Clinton was in
office, emails on federal accounts weren't automatically archived either and
Clinton and her aides would have done some handpicking as well.
She just submitted those
emails? She didn't have to do that immediately?
Nope. During the time Clinton
was in office, the Federal Records Act required government employees ensure
personal emails tied to government business was conserved "in the
appropriate agency record keeping system."
That law was updated in 2014,
requiring official emails sent from a personal address be forwarded to an
official government email within 20 days. That law came after Clinton left
office.
So it looks like there's no
smoking gun. But her decision to use a personal email account stored on her own
private server raises questions, at best, especially when you're (likely)
running for president. Anything else?
There's also a tinge of
hypocrisy in the air.
During Clinton's
personal-email-using, private-server-having tenure, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya
Scott Gration was criticized and ultimately pushed out of his post in part for
using a personal email address "for official government business,
including Sensitive
But Unclassified information."
Again, there's no evidence
Clinton included "sensitive but unclassified information" in her
emails, but a State Department investigation skewed the ambassador in question
for using his personal email at all in his official capacity. (He also used an
official government email.)
The 2012 Inspector General's
report, which was released shortly after Gration resigned his post as the
ambassador in Kenya, wrote that the use of personal email was against policy
"except in emergencies" and repeatedly slams him for using
"commercial email for official government business."
All the while, Clinton was
exclusively using her personal email.
There's just one more tidbit
revealed in a 2011 internal, unclassified, diplomatic cable from Clinton's office --
though there's no evidence she personally reviewed the cable. It gives the
department's employees guidance on "securing personal e-mail
accounts," Fox News reported.
One of the guidelines?
"Avoid conducting
official Department business from your personal e-mail account."
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