A dozen anti-secrecy groups are demanding that the State Department and National Archives independently verify that all official emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are accounted for.
Citing fears of setting “a dangerous precedent for future agency appointees,” the organizations told Secretary of State John Kerry and Archivist David Ferriero to do checks of their own to ensure that all workplace emails sent or received by Clinton during her time in office are on federal servers — not her own personal machine.
{mosads}“[T]he task of determining which emails constitute federal records should not be left solely to Mrs. Clinton’s personal aides,” the groups, including the Sunlight Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and OpenTheGovernment.org, wrote in a letter on Tuesday.
“Rather, the Archivist and State Department should oversee the process to ensure its independence and objectivity.”
Questions have swirled for weeks over Clinton’s use of a personal email account connected to a private server during her time in office, which prevented the State Department from preserving her correspondence.
In recent months, Clinton has handed over roughly 30,000 work-related emails from her server, though the decision about which to hand over was made by her and top aides alone — not the State Department or the National Archives. She has kept another 30,000 secret, claiming that they are personal.
Not only does the government need to retain the emails in keeping with the Federal Records Act, the advocacy groups note, but State Department communications are also subject to regulations under the Foreign Affairs Manual.
“The manner in which the former secretary’s emails were segregated from and only later returned to the State Department can set a dangerous precedent for future agency appointees,” they wrote.