An expert on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is calling Hillary Clinton’s assurances about her use of a private email account “laughable.”
“There is no doubt that the scheme she established was a blatant circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act, atop the Federal Records Act,” Daniel Metcalfe told The Canadian Press.
Metcalfe is currently a professor at American University. Prior to that he served in the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy from 1981 to 2007 where he helped federal agencies understand and comply with FOIA regulations.
“What she did was contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law,” Metcalfe said.
Besides using only a private email address, Clinton also used a private server registered to her Chappaqua, N.Y. home.
By having sole access to her emails, Clinton was able to avoid providing the records to FOIA requests. She also said Tuesday that she deleted more than 30,000 emails she claims were related to her personal life.
At least six FOIA requests were filed for records pertaining to Clinton’s emails or to any alias email accounts she may have operated.
But those were unfilled. While the State Department has failed to respond to some of the requests — something that the Associated Press is suing over — it has also completely rejected others claiming that no records could be found.
Those rejections should not have happened. Emails pertaining to official business must be turned over through FOIA even if sent through a private email account. Clinton only made her emails available to the State Department in December, nearly two years after she left office.
“You can’t have the secretary of state do that; that’s just a prescription for the circumvention of the FOIA,” Metcalfe told The Canadian Press. “Plus, fundamentally, there’s no way the people at the archives should permit that if you tell them over there.”
Clinton defended her use of the private account and her failure to convert her emails into records available to FOIA by claiming that a majority of them would have been archived as records because they were sent to others in the State Department or at outside federal agencies.
But that is a dodgy response, many have noted. It does not answer the question of how Clinton’s official emails to non-governmental employees — private corporations, her charity foundation, Bill Clinton, outside advisers — would have been captured.
Asked how he would have responded upon hearing that a federal official had set up a private email account while commandeering sole control over whether they would be turned over or deleted, Metcalfe told CBC, “I would’ve said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.'”
“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.”