Lots of people have asked lots of questions about Hillary Clinton and her email server. That’s fair enough. But I’ve got a couple of questions for the people with all the questions. There might be simple answers to these, but they’ve been bugging me for a while and I still don’t really understand them. Here they are:
- One of the most persistent suspicions is that Hillary set up a private server in order to evade FOIA requests. But this has never made any sense to me. What could possibly have led either Hillary or her staff to believe this? There’s simply nothing in either the statute or in the way it’s been applied in practice to suggest that official communications are beyond the reach of FOIA just because they’re in private hands.
- On a related note, what was going on in the State Department’s FOIA office? They received several FOIA requests that required them to search Hillary’s email, and responded by saying there was no record of anything relevant to
the request. But the very first time they did this, they must have realized that Hillary’s email archive wasn’t just sparse, but nonexistent. Did they ask Hillary’s office about this? If not, why not? If they did, what were they told? This should be relatively easy to answer since I assume these folks can be subpoenaed and asked about it.
Generally speaking, the reason I’ve been skeptical about this whole affair is that the nefarious interpretations have never made much sense to me. What Hillary did was almost certainly dumb—as she’s admitted herself—and it’s possible that she even violated some regulations. But those are relatively minor things. Emailgate is only a big issue if there was some kind of serious intent to defraud, and that hardly seems possible:
- Hillary’s private server didn’t protect her from FOIA requests and she surely knew this.
- By all indications, she was very careful about her email use and never wrote anything she might regret if it became public.
- And it hardly seems likely that she thought she could delete embarrassing emails before turning them over. There’s simply too much risk that the missing emails would show up in someone else’s account, and that really would be disastrous. Her husband might be the type to take idiotic risks like that, but she isn’t.
School me, peeps. I fully acknowledge that maybe I’m just not getting something here. What’s the worst case scenario that’s actually plausible?
POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m asking here solely about FOIA as it applies to the Hillary Clinton email server affair. On a broader level, FOIA plainly has plenty of problems, both in terms of response time and willingness to cooperate with the spirit of the statute.
