According to Bill Clinton:
“Nobody had ever done that before,” he said of the decision to hand the emails — more than 30,000 in all — back over to the State Department. “Now what are we supposed to do? We said you want to see, she said ‘fine, have them.'”
That’s from an article in the right wing Daily Caller, so I won’t cite their analysis, but needless to say Bill’s statement is a blatant lie. How would I know? I’m a professional email archivist.
I realize this is somewhat of an obscure field, so let me provide a couple links. If you want to learn about email archiving, probably the best place to start is with the presentations from the Archiving Email Symposium, a recent conference hosted by the Library of Congress.
The talks from this event cover best practices throughout the process. E.g.
- The best formats for the longterm preservation of email
- Which emails to save, and which to discard
- How long to keep sensitive information confidential before it can be made public
- How best to display email, make it searchable, and make it easy to access for both professional historians and the general public
- How best to preserve and leverage metadata, tags, folders, etc.
Needless to say, although this conference was recent and the best practices are constantly in flux, this is a field with at least two decades of history. Collecting 30,000+ emails from high level officials not only isn’t unprecedented, but it’s absolutely routine. There are tons of software packages designed specifically to do this, and most major government institutions have entire departments devoted to this.
Even your typical college or university will have one or two people on staff specially trained to archive email, as often public figures will bequeath their archives to their alma mater or some other university when they pass away. Again, these sorts of public figures often literally have several decades worth of email… Not just an average of seven or eight email threads a day for only four years, the way Hillary did.