> all communication with public officials is archived and made public

Is that all communication period, or only communication with them while they're acting in their capacity as a public official?

How do public officials keep their legitimately personal business private? (E.g., having an affair). Can their personal email accounts be opened up and made public at any time? I'm curious.

All government work related emails are archived. They're available to the public through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests - basically, you make a request to the federal government for certain types of information and they are required to provide it to you, subject to limitations for relevance, confidentiality, etc.

Purely personal emails aren't archived. Government officials and employees use personal email accounts all the time, and their contents aren't turned over to the government PROVIDED that they relate purely to prsonal matters.

But in Hillary Clinton's case, she used a personal email account (stored on her personal server) exclusively to conduct government business. She said she turned over government-related emails to the State Department (as is required by law) and permanently deleted the rest. She also says she never sent confidential info or received information marked as confidential through this personal email address.

There are several investigations going on right now into her email practices. The focus primarily is on whether she mishandled confidential/top secret information. In response to FOIA and other legal requests, the State Department has been releasing her emails to the public. But the State Department has been withholding some documents on the basis that they contained confidential/top secret information after all.

Clinton says the agencies are retroactively applying an overly broad definition of confidnetiality to her emails, but her detractors are saying that the confidentiality designations show that she mishandled government secrets in violation of the law. Hence the political firestorm.

No matter how this turns out, using a homebrew personal email server to conduct state business was an incredibly foolish thing to do. I can't believe Clinton did this. I don't care if Palin or Jeb Bush or other people used personal servers too - she was the Secretary of State with presidential ambitions, and she's had a big red target on her since 1992. This reinforces the worst stereotypes that people have about her and the Clintons in general, that they are secretive, paranoid, conspiratorial, and completely willing to operate in the grey areas of the law.

It seems like we could learn more about Clinton's emails by asking under FOIA for emails sent by a wide variety of other public officials to/from her? Do you know if this has or is already being done?

The latter. You can still use personal accounts for personal matters.

http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/toolkit/pdf/ID317.pdf

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/04/02/396823...

Pretty sure only when they are acting. I believe they can have personal email accounts/phones, but they cannot use them for official business. Of course, we all know how nearly impossible that is to pull of. For which, you'll have courts and analysts just like this, sitting there sifting the wheat from the chaff if it makes it this far.

> How do public officials keep their legitimately personal business private? (E.g., having an affair)

If there's any grains of truth in House of Cards, I assume burner phones

Also, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, while he was Milwaukee County Executive.