Posted: 01:47 EST
Updated: 11:19 EST
Updated 15:14 EST
Shortly after the NYT broke the story about the former secretary of state’s exclusive used of a personal email account to conduct government business, we sent an inquiry to the State Department’s Office of Inspector General. We don’t know if they could comment about it but we wanted to ask anyway. We’ve looked at the regs but the FAM is silent on the use of private email, or at least we thought it was. It almost seem as if the rule makers presumed that all employees will be using official email, thus, the rules only spell out the requirement for the preservation of records.
If Secretary Clinton was using a private email account and if her close advisers were also using private email accounts, we wanted to know how is this reconciled with the ability of individuals to FOIA government documents. We were also interested how this would keep other senior or even regular employees from using Yahoo or Gmail to conduct official business.
State/OIG’s response was, “we are not in a position to comment at this time.”
Actually, we asked the wrong questions.
In 2012, we blogged about the … Read on!
