Only emails related to official business. The distinction is crucial to these questions of law, but is consistently forgotten or elided, even by this Hill article.
It's not forgotten. No one believes her. (Except maybe you.)
She deleted the personal emails. Who does that? At most you don't turn them over, and then store them somewhere. Hard disks are cheap.
But no, she deleted them, making 100% sure no one could ever dispute her.
And I seem to remember an official email she did not disclose being discovered when the other person in the email disclosed it. So she is known to have withheld official emails.
You're essentially arguing that a person who desires privacy is therefore suspicious. I would hope that folks here on HN recognize that's a bullshit argument.
His argument is that she had the option to achieve privacy (by complying with the request and simply keeping her private emails). Instead they decided to not let anyone ever have the possibility to verify if she complied.
She chose to achieve privacy by making any future investigation impossible.
Is it legal? I guess, assuming she told the truth (and made no mistakes) about which emails were relevant. But personally I would like to hold people in office to a higher transparency and ethics standard than "strictly legal".
If a piece of information is stored so that it can be given to someone else later, that's not really very private. Privacy means the right to keep things away from others, and it includes the right to delete things.
Now maybe you want to argue that certain public officials should not permitted to have privacy while they are in office. That's fine, make that argument, but it's not the state of things now, legally or culturally.
And consider that there might be unintended consequences. It might deter some great people from considering public service. And it might put a hole in the legal concept of privacy that others will try to widen later.
I would argue that if we're going to be serious about legally protecting privacy, we need to be consistent. "Protect privacy, except for politicians I don't like" is not a particularly strong legal framework.
I don't even need to argue that certain public officials should not be permitted to have privacy while in office. She has a right to privacy. I am not arguing she doesn't.
I am arguing she made a series of poor choices that led to a situation where the only way she can live up to the standards we should expect from a public official (a verifiable paper trail for business pertaining to office) is by keeping a record of her private communications as well.
This is why you don't use your private email address for official business. If you want privacy while in office you don't use your private email server for official business. You aren't supposed to anyway. It's very simple and very reasonable.
I do NOT demand she hand over personal email! No. Only that she make it possible for a 3rd party to sort her emails into private/public.
She has the right to delete personal email - but only if it's actually personal, and I don't trust her to be the one to decide that.
She brought this on herself by mixing them in the first place. Want to maintain your privacy when you know you job requires publicity? Keep your public and private lives separate. She chose not to.
No one really cares about this issue except the House Republicans. They really are trying their hardest to figure out something here, but are obviously coming up empty. It just makes them look foolish.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0801b24d47274f0fac60beedc5f2e...
^ Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday...The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton's server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails.
The State Department did not get a warrant before asking Clinton and her staff to turn over emails that went through Clinton's server.