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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

Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Defense

Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, had a "secret" email address but it was a .gov domain.

Donald Berwick, of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Gary Cohen, a deputy administrator of health insurance reform

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez

Possibly Eric Schultz, whose name is redacted in various FOIA emails without explanation.

Seth Harris, who in 2013 was the acting labor secretary

Ken Salazar, who was Interior Secretary

Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security

UPDATE: Jim Jones, National Security Advisor

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.

And finally, in her own special category, Lois Lerner used a personal email address for some communications, but the contents are not available to determine whether and how many were related to government business. She is also on this list because crashing your hard drive with all your email records on it is one way to try to maintain a private email address. And also because she is on record in one of the emails she did not delete as telling her subordinates to communicate using instant messaging rather than email because that was not being archived.

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]

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