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The NY Times reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, according to State Department officials. She may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record.
Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. "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," said attorney Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the "letter and spirit of the rules."
(Score: 5, Informative) by MrGuy on Wednesday March 04 2015, @03:48PM
Citation needed. Exactly WHICH law exactly are you asserting was violated?
Most news criticism is focused on the Presidential Records Act [wikipedia.org], which was passed in 1978. However, the act as originally passed did not (because it was known at the time) make any provisions for e-mail.
The Presidential Records Act was AMENDED [wikipedia.org] to include specifications around e-mail, and contains language forbidding the use of non-governmental e-mails for government business.
However, this amendment was not passed until 2014. Secretary Clinton stepped down as Secretary of State in 2013. During the entire time Secretary Clinton was Secretary of State, the law did NOT have such provision. As ex post facto [wikipedia.org] laws are unconstitutional in the US, I'm not seeing how any of these actions can reasonably described as unlawful. Unless there's another law that's NOT the Presidential Records Act that you believe was violated. In which case, again, citation needed.
That doesn't mean that this isn't a dumb thing to do, or was OK. It's been over a decade since most corporations have had clear policies prohibiting their employees from conducting corporate business on personal accounts. It's astounding to me that the Federal Government didn't have similar guidelines and requirements. So I'm not OK with her actions.
But "clearly unlawful" isn't obvious to me.