In a move reminiscent of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Ash Carter decided to use his personal email to conduct official government business.
This is the second Obama administration official in a high-level national security role to run afoul of email security practices, The New York Times reports.
Carter continued this practice for at least two months after the Clinton email scandal broke in March of this year, according to an investigation by The New York Times. Back in March, it was revealed that Clinton, while Secretary of State, had used a personal email account for government business.
Carter’s use of his personal email to correspond with top advisers about government business is a clear violation of Department of Defense regulations established in 2012.
The White House discovered Carter’s activities in May, after which point Chief of Staff Denis R. McDonough tried to find out exactly what was going on and asked the White House Counsel’s Office to get in touch with the Department of Defense. At some point following contact between the White House and the DOD, Carter stopped using his personal email account, though when exactly is unclear.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told The New York Times that Carter was wrong to use his personal email account.
“After reviewing his email practices earlier this year, the secretary believes that his previous, occasional use of personal email for work-related business, even for routine administrative issues and backed up to his official account, was a mistake,” Cook said. “As a result, he stopped such use of his personal email and further limited his use of email altogether.”
Cook added that Carter’s personal email account did not deal in classified material, though one of the emails describes a time when Carter accidentally placed information in a “burn bag,” which is used to destroy sensitive data.
The statement did not address the violation of regulations, and follow-up questions from The New York Times on this issue went unanswered.
Unlike Clinton, though, Carter reportedly did not use a private email server, which in Clinton’s case, was managed by an IT firm not cleared to deal with classified material.
Instead, Carter simply used his iPhone and iPad to send the messages. The Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to look into the Clinton case, which consists of 55,000 pages of emails the former Secretary of State handed over to the agency.
Carter landed in Iraq on Thursday, where he’s scheduled to meet with U.S. military commanders.
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