WaPo | Earnest said the administration would have to
rely on Clinton’s assurances that she met the fallback requirement of
sending along the pertinent e-mails to be archived.
In
Clinton’s case, that happened only after the State Department requested
records from her and other former secretaries last fall, around the
time the records law was updated.
About 300 of Clinton’s recovered e-mails were
turned over to a congressional committee investigating the 2012 deaths
of four Americans at U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. The chairman of
that panel, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), said Tuesday that the former
secretary of state used multiple personal accounts.
“You
do not need a law degree to have an understanding of how troubling this
is,” Gowdy told reporters at a news conference. “One should also be
concerned about the national security implications of former secretary
Clinton using exclusively personal e-mail accounts for the conducting of
official U.S. foreign policy.”
But
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said that “both the letter and spirit of
the rules permitted State Department officials to use nongovernment
e-mail, as long as appropriate records were preserved.” He noted that
the current secretary of state, John F. Kerry, is the first one to have
an official e-mail account.
Aides to Clinton
declined to explain why she did not set up a State Department e-mail
account. Clinton did not address the e-mail controversy during a
political speech in Washington on Tuesday night.
By the time she came to the department, in 2009, the practice of high
government officials conducting government business using personal
e-mail accounts had become controversial. Democrats were intensely
critical of George W. Bush administration officials, including top political strategist Karl Rove, who used an account registered by the Republican National Committee for e-mails sent from the White House.
