The CBC has interviewed Daniel Metcalfe, head of the Justice Department's Office of Information from 1981 through 2007, regarding Hillary Clinton's use of private email, and her statement regarding her private email use.
A little more on him:
In 1981, after a judicial clerkship and serving as a Justice Department trial attorney, he was appointed to the position of founding director of the Department's Office of Information and Privacy (OIP). For more than a quarter-century in that position, he guided all federal agencies on the government-wide administration of the Freedom of Information Act, directly supervised the defense of more than 500 FOIA and Privacy Act lawsuits in district and appellate courts, testified before Congress on FOIA amendment legislation and authored Attorney General FOIA memoranda for successive presidential administrations, and met with representatives of nearly 100 nations and international governing bodies as they considered the development and implementation of their own government transparency laws. He became a career member of the Senior Executive Service in 1984, the youngest Justice Department attorney then and since to hold such a position.
So, a bit of authority behind his words:
Daniel Metcalfe doesn't buy her explanation. In fact, he calls it laughable.
"What she did was contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law," says Metcalfe, the founding director of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, which advised the rest of the administration on how to comply with the law. Metcalfe ran the office from 1981 to 2007.
"There is no doubt that the scheme she established was a blatant circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act, atop the Federal Records Act."
For what it's worth, Metcalfe says he's a registered Democrat, who quit government during the Bush administration because he was "embarrassed."
He goes on, with especially important points about Clinton choosing which emails made it to the official record, with blame for both Clinton and the people responsible for archiving such records:
"You can't have the secretary of state do that; that's just a prescription for the circumvention of the FOIA. Plus, fundamentally, there's no way the people at the archives should permit that if you tell them over there."'
[...]
His overall conclusion from her public appearance: "Her suggestion that government employees can unilaterally determine which of their records are personal and which are official, even in the face of a FOIA request, is laughable."
He also called Clinton's statements are her press conference "deceptive" and "grossly misleading."
• Also today: Jen Psaki: Hillary Clinton didn’t use a State Department BlackBerry
I don't know the full implications of that, although at first look it seems to speak to the issue of security, and may speak to physical and official ability to operate two different email accounts in the single device.
• And I love this WSJ story:
On Wednesday, a senior State Department official said that during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, from 2009 to early 2013, it wasn’t possible for employees to access personal email through an email app on their official BlackBerrys. They could use the BlackBerry’s Internet browser to check personal emails, but that was a clunky system.
1. Why would any respectable newspaper grant anonymity for such benign information? That's journalistic malpractice, and calls the entire report into question.
2. On "their official BlackBerrys"? Please see above.
3. We know that a Cabinet official during Clinton's time as SoS used a Blackberry with two different email accounts.