Hillary Clinton had been using private email from personal domain throughout her tenure as U.S. Secretary of the Sate indicating violation of the federal laws.
Hillary Rhodham Clinton, who has been the U.S. Secretary of State from January 2009 till March 2013, was using her personal emails for all the official communications. This news was reported by New York Times on Monday. On January 13th 2009 a personal domain “clintonemail.com” was registered, just a week before President Obama took up his Presidential duties. As per the Federal Records Act all the Government official documents are automatically preserved for future reference. It is absolutely unbelievable that an official on such a high rank should be using private email on personal domain instead of an official email for all the Government business purposes. This would also mean that whatever emails and documents were used in the State Affairs for the last four years may not have been preserved, which indicates a breach of the compliance and security.
Not only that it could also mean that Hillary’s account could also have been hacked. The Benghazi investigations actually revealed that Clinton used to carry out all her official communications using her personal email. Sidney Blumenthal, who is an adviser to Clinton, had his account hacked by the Romanian hacker “Guccifer” in March 2013. The hacker then published some of the emails containing conversations of Clinton and Blumenthal on RT.com. These emails mainly contained details of September 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. It was during this time Gawker reported that the emails from Blumenthal are going to the personal email id of Clinton. It was also surprising that Clinton was having communications with Blumenthal who was against Obama’s government. With the revelation of Clinton’s Stealth IT i.e. when someone in an organization implements an IT service without going through IT, it is an question as to how many accounts does Guccifer actually has an access to?
It does not seem that Hillary Clinton’s staff thought of at least maintaining a proper back up of her communications or preparing archives as per the Federal Records Act. Now investigations are carried out to check if the former First Lady violated federal requirements. A lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, Jason R. Baron says “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business.” Clinton’s advisers handed over some 55,000 of her personal emails to State Department officials recently. The officials still feel that there could be more stuff than these emails also there are doubts if these emails were encrypted for security purposes.
Hillary Clinton is expected to make a public announcement regarding her presidential race in April however with this news wonder what would be the political outcome.
