Freedom of Information Act Expert: Clinton's Email System "Laughable"

Politico ^ | March 12, 2015 | Nick Gass

[Steelfish]

Freedom of Information Act Expert: Clinton's Email System "Laughable" By Nick Gass 3/12/15

A top freedom-of-information expert isn’t buying Hillary Clinton’s explanation of why she set up her own email system to conduct official State Department business, calling it “laughable.” Daniel Metcalfe, who advised White House administrations on interpreting the Freedom of Information Act from 1981 to 2007, told The Canadian Press that the former secretary of state acted “contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law.”

“There is no doubt that the scheme she established was a blatant circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act, atop the Federal Records Act,” he said, reviewing a transcript of Clinton’s remarks during her Tuesday news conference. Clinton told reporters she deleted approximately 30,000 personal emails from her private account that she also used as secretary of state.

The FOIA expert said if he had heard of a Cabinet member setting up a personal email system and deciding what gets deleted and what gets kept as government record, “I would’ve said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’”

“You can’t have the secretary of state do that; that’s just a prescription for the circumvention of the FOIA,” he said. “Plus, fundamentally, there’s no way the people at the archives should permit that if you tell them over there.”

[cripplecreek]

Clinton state department security.

[GraceG]

It was intentionaly setup the way it was setup to bypass FOIA requests period. end of story..

Hillary’s IT guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QGkOGZubQ

[justa-hairyape]

Someone needs to sit down and calculate how long it would take to read 30,000 emails and determine if they were all personal or business related. And then delete them. Have gone though a few hundred myself and it is no easy chore. At the very least an honest ethical person would have sent them to an archival folder just in case a few mistakes were made in the review and deletion process.

[PubliusMM]

Giving the emails in paper form also avoids the routing and traffic details... Surely, the path by which the emails traveled would present potential breach points.

Just sayin’

[Billthedrill]

“Her suggestion that government employees can unilaterally determine which of their records are personal and which are official, even in the face of a FOIA request, is laughable,” he said.

Hmm...suddenly no one's laughing. The key phrase here is "government employees". Hillary doesn't work for the government or the people. We all work for her.