Obama administration officials who maintained private email accounts
A recent survey says that 16% of respondents used personal email for government business "always" or "often". Add "sometimes" and you get to 33%. Add "rarely" and you get to 63%. ("Sometimes" or "Rarely" are probably legal for non-classified emails if the email is cc'd to their official account; "always" or "often" is likely improper). And those are just the people willing to admit to doing it and who bothered to answer a survey. The same survey asked if the emails were properly preserved; 31% said no and 47% said they didn't know. That's 78% who might have unknowingly committed felonies by destroying federal records and who don't seem to care.
You know what I think?
I think it looks like a policy.
I'm putting the list of high-level officials known to use a personal or private email address for government business below the fold.
Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, registered a private email domain the day her Senate confirmation hearings began and used that private email server exclusively for the entirety of her term in office. She reportedly did not even have a personal email address at the State Department, only her private address. UPDATE: In addition, her top staffers used those Clinton email addresses. Specifically named are Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff, and Phillipe Reines, deputy assistant secretary of state. However, while Reines is admitting that he has personal email addresses, he is claiming vigorously that he does not have a ClintonEmail.com address and at least some of the time redirects conversations to his official address.
UPDATE: Also allegedly Cheryl Mills, Hillary's chief of staff at State. Huma Abedin, named above, is her deputy.
Eric Holder may have used a personal email address (because his name was redacted from various FOIA emails without explanation, and DOJ is refusing to respond to inquiries). UPDATE: Holder used aliases "Henry Yearwood" and "Lew Alcindor", possibly others; .gov claims private addresses did not interfere with FOIA requests but will not reveal the private address itself even to Congress in unreleased emails.
Criminal Division Head Lanny Breuer forwarded Fast and Furious emails to his home account.
Lisa Jackson of the Environment Protection Agency (aka "Richard Windsor"), along with her subordinate Rafael Moure-Eraso and two more unnamed subordinates
UPDATE: Ashton Carter, Secretary of Defense (!!!), used personal email for official business according to The Hill, and continued using it after Hillary's email scandal broke for two months.
UPDATE: Senator (and now Secretary of State) John Kerry sent classified information to Hillary Clinton's private email address from his own private email address.
Finally, I'd like to reiterate that having a personal email address that is not used for government business is not wrong. Probably literally everyone does that. Using that email address for non-classified government business occasionally is not necessarily a big deal; think, for example, of emailing your boss from home that you need to call in sick.
This list is intended to call out those individuals who used private email addresses extensively to conduct government business, with the presumed intent to avoid disclosure.
This entry was published Sun Mar 08 20:57:27 CDT 2015 by TriggerFinger
and last updated 2016-02-29 20:14:28.0.
[Tweet]