Between 2009 and 2013, while she was in office as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is said to have used her personal email for work. To avoid speculations over the inappropriateness of this practice, she decided to ask for the release of all the emails from that period of time. “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.” – the former U. S. Senator wrote on Twitter.
This message is Hillary Clinton’s first public intervention since the beginning of the scandal surrounding her unsuitable use of a private email account. It comes as an answer to the comments in The New York Times, published earlier this week. This might be a crucial turning point in H. Clinton’s career, since her nomination as the Democrat candidate for the White House is very likely to happen, given that she is leading in all the polls so far. However, it is still premature to say whether she will be the one to run for president and maybe much depends on the outcome of the email release.
The disclosure of the documents might nevertheless take a while, because, as the State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf has announced in the aftermath of Clinton’s tweet, the standard procedure of reviewing the emails before release will be time-consuming, given the volume of information. According to Reuters, we are talking about a set of files that is 55,000 pages large. As ABC news has announced, a certain number of emails that do not concern work will be checked but not handed to the public.
According to her legal representative David Kendall, Hillary Clinton used only one email address during her stay in office as Secretary of State. However, as Jason R. Baron (a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath and a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration) observed, the use of a personal email account in governmental affairs is “inconsistent with the Federal Records Act and longstanding policies of the National Archives”.
Hillary Clinton’s request to have her emails made public was made after the House Select Committee, which was investigating the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, had sent subpoenas to the State Department demanding all of the former Secretary of State’s communications in connection to Libya.
image source: USA Today