Clinton may have broken transparency rules with email use at State

Former Secretary of State and presumptive Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton might have violated transparency rules by solely using her personal email address for official business, according to a report in The New York Times. 

That means that her official correspondence from her tenure at the State Department wasn’t immediately backed up on government servers, so aides had to comb through emails to hand official work over to the State Department. So far, aides gave the agency 55,000 emails, according to the Times, and recently turned over 900 pages discussing the attacks on the annex in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. 

{mosads}The issue will undoubtedly raise questions as to whether all of her official emails were turned over, questions that could dog Clinton during potential White House bid. Clinton’s emails will likely be the object of Congressional committees looking to investigate her involvement in certain issues or of journalists seeking Freedom of Information Act requests. 

Clinton’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, told the Times that Clinton is complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.” But Jason Baron, a former official at the National Archives and Records Administration, said that the behavior is uncommon. 

“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,” Baron told the paper. 

Michael Short, a spokesman with the Republican National Committee slammed Clinton in a statement by email late Monday night.

“Voters should be extremely concerned Hillary Clinton kept all of her official email correspondence off the books at the same time corporations and foreign governments that donated to her foundation were lobbying her State Department,” he said.

“Whether it’s these new developments or the decades of secrecy surrounding the Clintons, Hillary comes across as someone that’s got something to hide,” Short said.

All government officials have to preserve their official records for historical significance and any official use after the fact. 

Former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), largely considered one of the front-runners for the GOP nomination in 2016, released hundreds of thousands of old emails from his time in the Florida statehouse to much fanfare from his political action committee, which portrayed the dump as part of Bush’s commitment to transparency. 

But the group had to scramble to redact personal information that hadn’t been removed prior to the release.

Bush also criticized Clinton on Twitter, calling for the release of all her unclassified emails.

Transparency matters. Unclassified @HillaryClinton emails should be released. You can see mine, here. http://t.co/wZbtwd8O2j

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) March 3, 2015

— Updated on March 3 at 7:05 a.m.