Hellery Clinton's writers took a week to come up with her explanation for using her personal e-mail account rather than a government account during her entire tenure as Secretary of State. "It was for convenience," she told us, with a straight face (but somewhat fluttery body language).
The presidential wannabe says it was too much for her to juggle two "devices" and two phones, so she thought it would be simpler to just use the one, in spite of the legal requirement to preserve public records. Ms Clinton, being a college graduate, thought that she was capable of deciding which messages were personal and which were public, and FRA and FOIA be damned. Convenience trumps legalities.
Who finds this funny? Daniel Metcalfe -- that's who. Mr. Metcalfe was the most senior freedom-of-information official in the executive branch of the US government for over a quarter-century. It was his job to help four administrations — including that of Clinton the First — interpret the Freedom of Information Act.
When Mr. Metcalfe read a transcript of Clinton the Second's press conference, he told Canadian Press, "What she did was 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."
Here's how he said he would have reacted if he'd heard about a cabinet member in his day setting up a personal email system — and deciding what got deleted and what got preserved as a government record: "I would've said, 'You've gotta be kidding me!"
Mr. Metcalfe said he knows from working under the Clintons [like Monica Lewinsky? Ed.] that Hillary — secretary of state, senator, 2016 presidential hopeful and lawyer — understands the Freedom of Information Act. "You can't have the secretary of state do that; that's just a prescription for the circumvention of the FOIA. Plus, fundamentally, there's no way the people at the archives should permit that if you tell them over there."
What Mr. doesn't fully appreciate is that laws, rules and regulations don't apply to the Clintons, just as they didn't apply to the Kennedys, back in the day. In the increasingly unlikely event that Hellery is elected to head a second Clinton administration, he will find that out.
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