Clinton kept official government e-mails on a private server.

At a brief press conference this afternoon former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton read a statement and took questions explaining why she kept a private computer server – site unclear – for all of her official government e-mails when she served as U.S. Secretary of State during the first Obama administration.

She confirmed that all of her private e-mails were also recorded on that same Clinton server. 

This practice was publicly revealed just recently.  President Obama claims not to have had knowledge of that custom. 

 

Mrs. Clinton, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2016 presidential race, spoke about this today from U.N. Headquarters, defending the use of her own server by invoking loosely-defined rules which, at the time, she claims, permitted her to do so.

But it doesn’t pass the smell test.  Minimally, even the mere appearance of impropriety on this matter by the highest-level official at the Department of State simply does not compute.  (Current Secretary of State John Kerry does not transmit and record his government e-mails with a private server.)

Using another rationale to support the leaking-sieve rules then in effect, Hillary Clinton stated that official e-mails transmitted from her private server to government employees were recorded on the recipients State Department computers.

If any authorized persons or investigators need to access official e-mails sent by her to those recipients, all they have to do is to seek them out, she said.

  

However – and this is paramount to her claim – Clinton failed to explain whether there even exists within the U.S. Government the capability in the form of aggregating software to achieve such a task

 

I doubt this to be the case because, until now, what reason would there have been to develop such software?  The U.S. Government simply does not Google™ itself!

NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration is the agency that is legally charged with gathering official records and preserving them for posterity and public access.

But how is it supposed to sort and categorize the 50,000 pages provided by Hillary Clinton – not electronic records, mind you – but old-fashioned paper copies that will eventually reach NARA?

And how does NARA know that it has all of the official e-mails residing on the Clinton server?

It doesn’t.  Mrs. Clinton said that she will not provide access to her server:  The law as then written relies solely on her own personal, unverified judgment about whether she has complied.  There is no enforcement mechanism.

And that, dear readers, is that.  At least Mrs. Clinton is not trying to fool us with promises of transparency should she become the next occupant of the White House.

Thank you for reading.  Enjoy the taste of spring.

NOTE:  (Sunday afternoon, while driving one of my grandsons back to the University of Maryland, we passed by a NARA facility in College Park.  It’s huge – an impressive structure.  Good luck NARA!)