Jarrett: Obama has ‘very firm’ policy on emails

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said Friday that President Obama has a “very firm” policy on emails, drawing a contrast with Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal account.

“The president has a very firm policy that emails should be kept on government systems,” Jarrett said in a TV interview with Bloomberg on Friday. But she added that other agencies were responsible for enforcing their own transparency rules.

{mosads}”We establish the policy here, but then we leave it up to every single agency to determine how to adhere to that policy,” Jarrett added.

The White House has been dogged in recent days by questions about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account as secretary of State. Clinton reportedly used a private server hosted at her home, raising security concerns as well.

Jarrett said the president “believes in transparency and I know that the State Department is currently working with the National Archives to make sure that all of Secretary Clinton’s emails are captured.”

Jarrett told Bloomberg that she did not receive any emails from Clinton.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said this week that the administration has a careful policy of using government email accounts for official business, even as he refrained from criticizing Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for 2016.

“Very specific guidance has been given to agencies all across the government, which is specifically that employees of the Obama administration should use their official email accounts when they’re conducting official government business,” Earnest said Tuesday.

“However, when there are situations where personal email accounts are used, it is important for those records to be preserved, consistent with the Federal Records Act,” he added. 

In 2011, amid concerns that China had tapped the accounts of U.S. officials, then-press secretary Jay Carney referenced the Presidential Records Act, noting “the administration policy that is effective here is that we — all of our work is conducted on work email accounts.”

State Department lawyers last summer noticed Clinton operated a personal email as secretary and asked she turn over documents related to the deadly Benghazi attack, according to The New York Times. Three weeks ago State turned over hundreds of pages of emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, the Times reported.

Clinton tweeted this week that she wanted the State Department to release the about 55,000 pages of hand-selected emails she turned over to be made public record.

Most, 90 percent, were correspondence that officials at the department already had, according to The Washington Post, while 10 percent were with others, including at the White House.

It is unclear if Clinton violated State Department rules. The State Department under Clinton criticized a then-U.S. ambassador to Kenya for using personal email. The former ambassador, Scott Gration, left the department shortly before a critical report was published that mentioned his use of personal account.

But Republicans have seized on the controversy, with the House panel investigating Benghazi subpoenaing emails from Clinton’s personal accounts.

Republicans say that even if Clinton didn’t break federal law, she at least skirted administration policy. 

Jarrett on Friday said the administration was committed to transparency.

“We have training here at the White House on a continuous basis to make sure that our staff understand the importance of keeping it on the system so that it’s there,” she said.

“We believe in the transparency and we believe in the public records, that they need to be captured, and so we constantly are having trainings for our team to make sure they know what’s going on and we encourage all the other agencies to do the same.”