Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official — or first secretary of state — to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work, appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an agency’s computer server is not working.

“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business,” said Mr. Baron, who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.

Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records.

But Mrs. Clinton and her aides failed to do so.

How many emails were in Mrs. Clinton’s account is not clear, and neither is the process her advisers used to determine which ones related to her work at the State Department before turning them over.

“It’s a shame it didn’t take place automatically when she was secretary of state as it should have,” said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a group based at George Washington University that advocates government transparency. “Someone in the State Department deserves credit for taking the initiative to ask for the records back. Most of the time it takes the threat of litigation and embarrassment.”

Mr. Blanton said high-level officials should operate as President Obama does, emailing from a secure government account, with every record preserved for historical purposes.

“Personal emails are not secure,” he said. “Senior officials should not be using them.”

Penalties for not complying with federal record-keeping requirements are rare, because the National Archives has few enforcement abilities.

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, declined to detail why she had chosen to conduct State Department business from her personal account. He said that because Mrs. Clinton had been sending emails to other State Department officials at their government accounts, she had “every expectation they would be retained.” He did not address emails that Mrs. Clinton may have sent to foreign leaders, people in the private sector or government officials outside the State Department.

The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.

And others who, like Mrs. Clinton, are eyeing a candidacy for the White House are stressing a very different approach. Jeb Bush, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, released a trove of emails in December from his eight years as governor of Florida.

It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton’s private email account included encryption or other security measures, given the sensitivity of her diplomatic activity.

Mrs. Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, has used a government email account since taking over the role, and his correspondence is being preserved contemporaneously as part of State Department records, according to his aides.

Before the current regulations went into effect, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who served from 2001 to 2005, used personal email to communicate with American officials and ambassadors and foreign leaders.

Last October, the State Department, as part of the effort to improve its record keeping, asked all previous secretaries of state dating back to Madeleine K. Albright to provide it with any records, like emails, from their time in office for preservation.

“These steps include regularly archiving all of Secretary Kerry’s emails to ensure that we are capturing all federal records,” said a department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki.

The existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered by a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi as it sought correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and her aides about the attack.

Two weeks ago, the State Department, after reviewing Mrs. Clinton’s emails, provided the committee with about 300 emails — amounting to roughly 900 pages — about the Benghazi attacks.

Mrs. Clinton and the committee declined to comment on the contents of the emails or whether they will be made public.

The State Department, Ms. Psaki said, “has been proactively and consistently engaged in responding to the committee’s many requests in a timely manner, providing more than 40,000 pages of documents, scheduling more than 20 transcribed interviews and participating in several briefings and each of the committee’s hearings.”

希拉蕊爆違法 用私人電郵處理公務

紐約時報報導，美國前第一夫人希拉蕊．柯林頓在擔任國務卿四年期間，並沒有開設公家的電子郵件地址，完全以私人電郵帳號處理公務，恐違反聯邦政府要求官員信件往來必須存檔保留的規定。希拉蕊的發言人未說明她為何使用私人電郵，不排除刻意迴避監督。

美國國務院官員說，希拉蕊的助理未依「聯邦檔案法」規定，把她的私人郵件保存在國務院的伺服器上。

直到兩個月前，為回應國務院的要求，希拉蕊的顧問才查閱數以萬計的電郵，把五萬五千頁電郵交給國務院。但希拉蕊在那四年間總共有多少郵件，她的顧問如何判定哪些郵件與國務院有關，則不清楚。

國務院發言人說，國務院去年十月要求所有前國務卿交出持有的紀錄，希拉蕊應要求交出郵件。

希拉蕊大量使用私人電郵處理公務，讓國家檔案局官員及政府監督機構感到震驚，認為此舉嚴重違反規定。

希拉蕊的發言人梅瑞爾說，希拉蕊的做法未違反「法規的文字和精神」。他未說明希拉蕊為何使用私人電郵，但他說，希拉蕊傳郵件到美國官員的公家郵址，因此也有紀錄，不過希拉蕊也可能與外國領袖和民間人士通信。

希拉蕊不是第一個用私人電郵帳號處理公務的國務卿，2001年到05年間擔任國務卿的鮑爾，也用私人電郵和美國官員、大使和外國領袖聯繫，不過，那是在現行法規生效以前。

國家檔案局前官員巴倫說，希拉蕊完全使用私人郵件處理公務很不尋常，通常在緊急狀況，例如公家機關伺服器當機時才會這樣做。

倡議政府透明化組織「國家安全檔案」執行長布蘭頓說，高階官員應依照歐巴馬總統的做法，使用政府的安全電郵帳號，每一封郵件都存檔留紀錄。他說：「私人郵件不安全，高階官員不應使用。」目前不清楚希拉蕊的私人電郵帳號是否加密或其他安全措施，她的繼任者柯瑞上任後就使用公家電郵帳號。

希拉蕊和她的夫婿前總統柯林頓長期被批評不夠透明，喜歡搞神秘。反觀有意角逐共和黨總統候選人的傑布．布希去年十二月公布他在佛州州長八年任內的郵件。

華盛頓郵報報導，希拉蕊可能提前在四月宣布角逐民主黨總統候選人，讓競選團隊早點就定位，她可以強力回應射向她的各種指控。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clintons-use-of-private-email-at-state-department-raises-flags.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/usa/20150303/c03emails/zh-hant/

2015-03-04．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡