Hillary's Impulse to Secrecy

Italics mine.

So far, the explanation from Clintonworld about the failure to comply with this basic rule of modern archiving has been inadequate and unpersuasive.

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill "declined to detail why she had chosen to conduct State Department business from her personal account," reported The New York Times, which broke the story. Merrill said that because Clinton was communicating with other State Department officials on their government accounts, she had "every expectation they would be retained," the Times added.

This has the distinct odor of hogwash. First, the basic rule that government business is to be transacted from government accounts doesn't have a well-we'll-capture-it-anyway exception.

Second, the government records to be retained aren't only intra-agency communications. If Clinton is emailing with world leaders or others about official business, the entire point of the Federal Records Act is to ensure that those communications are captured for history.

This should have been clear. Certainly, the intersection of email and federal records law has been evolving. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell writes about his effort to use "the then-newfangled email system" to communicate with counterparts overseas. His successor, Condoleezza Rice, rarely used email to transact business but employed her government address when she did.

Nonetheless, by the time Clinton assumed office in 2009, "nobody in government understood that a high-level official would solely use a private email system," said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath and former director of litigation for the National Archives and Records Administration. If officials also used private accounts, he added, regulations in place at the time provided that "you need to transfer those emails to an official record-keeping system."

What is the legitimate reason for conducting official business on a personal back-channel? Why, if not for purposes of secrecy, would Clinton choose to operate that way?

That Clinton has recently turned over 55,000 pages of email records in response to an overdue burst of documentary housekeeping by State does not excuse her lack of compliance while in office.

That her proto-campaign describes her activities as complying with "both the letter and spirit" of the rules would be jaw-dropping, if it weren't so sadly familiar.

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.