March 8, 2015
BenghazibabeatclintonemaildotcomBy Clarice Feldman
You can say this about the Clintons; they fill our desire for drama in the annual breaks between episodes of TV serials. “Downton Abbey” ends for the season and Clinton Follies is on tap again as the New York Times reports as old news, something known for at least two years: Hillary never used the Department of State’s official email account
If you’ve been busy leading a full and rich life and missed this week’s excitement here it is in a nutshell: on the day of her confirmation hearing for the position of secretary of state, Hillary Clinton set up an internet server in her home (purchased under an apparent pseudonym “Eric Hoteham”). Perhaps the domain was even run out of two commercial web hosting firms, instead of the home server:
For her entire term at the department she exclusively used this unprotected email server, utilizing at last count about 9 different email addresses for all her Internet communications. These entire addresses end in clintonemail@com, which signaled to anyone reading the message that this was not, sent on a government server.
This tactic allowed her to avoid disclosure of her correspondence to Freedom of Information Act and other document production requests, including Congressional inquiries.
Can she claim she didn’t know this violated Federal laws and regulations requiring this correspondence be kept where it can be archived and, if required, disclosed? Hardly. All officials are routinely warned about such things. In fact, she ordered our ambassador to Kenya fired for failing to use a government server for his communications.
In connection with Congressional hearings the department was asked to provide her email correspondence and, so the story goes, they had none, so Hillary had her staff go through her records and late last year provided 50,000 emails, and claimed others might be found in the recipients’ files.
There is also little doubt, given this functional definition, that e-mail has been covered by the Federal Records Act since its adoption by the federal government during the Clinton administration. As Ian Tuttle correctly notes, the State Department’s own manual has plainly provided, since 1995, that e-mail records must be preserved under the Federal Records Act.
...snip
Best practices have always been that an employee using a private account for government business has to either print the e-mail (which rarely happens) or copy or forward the e-mail to the employee’s official government e-mail account for preservation. Those practices, which reflected the law as it existed before Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, were codified by National Archives Regulations in 2009, which required that any records created on private e-mail accounts must be saved to the federal-records system. And Congress confirmed that in 2013, by adopting a prohibition on the use of private e-mail, unless the employee forwards to or copies an official e-mail account within 60 days of the record’s creation. But Mrs. Clinton did something here that went well beyond occasional or incidental use of private e-mail accounts. She eschewed the use of an official account entirely, and deliberately established a private e-mail account, apparently maintained on a server in the Clintons’ New York home. As a result, her e-mails were at no time during her tenure in office subject to the Federal Records Act. (She provided some of the e-mails only after she left office, and only when the Department of State asked for them back.) As our friends at Judicial Watch will no doubt remind everyone, there were plenty of Freedom of Information Act requests that would have implicated her e-mails. But they were never searched, even though a reasonable search of all responsive federal records must be made in response to FOIA requests. And the records would have been relevant to congressional inquiries as well, including continuing investigations of the Benghazi attacks. Why does that matter? Well, a federal criminal law makes it a felony when any custodian of official government records “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same.” The crime is punishable by up to three years in prison. And interestingly, Congress felt strongly enough about the crime that it included the unusual provision that the perpetrator shall “forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
Read more:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/03/benghazibabeatclintonemaildotcom.html++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
