|
?:reviewBody
|
-
The specter of missing e-mails loomed large throughout the 2016 presidential election cycle because of a scandal arising from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's mishandling of electronic communications while serving as secretary of state between 2009 and 2013. The issue was twofold, according to Clinton's critics: one aspect was her use of a private e-mail server to send and receive official messages, laying open the possibility that classified information could have been exchanged in an insecure environment; the other was the deletion of approximately 30,000 e-mails from that server (messages Clinton claimed were personal and unrelated to official business) prior to an FBI investigation of the case. The FBI concluded there was no criminal wrongdoing or intent to violate laws concerning the handling of classified information on the part of Clinton or her staff, but FBI Director James B. Comey issued a statement calling Clinton's actions extremely careless. The deleted e-mails remained an issue because only Clinton's lawyers were involved in deciding which messages would be culled as non-work-related. GOP candidate Donald Trump brought them up repeatedly in speeches and debates, at one point joking that he hoped Russia could help find them. Given all the criticism directed at Clinton, it was only a matter of time before an incident involving a large number of e-mails that went missing during the Republican George W. Bush administration was revived and injected into the 2016 campaign. On 12 September, Newsweek ran an article by Nina Burleigh entitled The George W. Bush Administration 'Lost' 22 Million E-mails, which explicitly compared the State Department e-mail fiasco to the one that occurred in the Bush White House and suggested that the latter was infinitely more serious: The comparison is apt in some ways, not so much in others. One similarity is the use of private e-mail servers in lieu of government ones. During the course of a Congressional investigation it was found that many Bush White House staffers (including then-Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove) had conducted official business via private e-mail accounts on a server owned and maintained by the Republican National Committee. Then it was revealed that as many as 22 million e-mails sent and received via these private accounts were not preserved in accordance with the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which requires that all official communications be archived and accounted for: In plain terms, some 22 million e-mails had been deleted, though the White House described them as lost or missing — another apparent point of comparison between the Bush and Clinton e-mail scandals. However, at least some of the 22 million lost Bush administration e-mails (unlike Clinton's 30,000) were eventually found. To put it more accurately, a large number (it's unclear exactly how many) of the messages were recovered from backup storage systems by technicians as a result of a deal struck between the federal government and two nonprofit groups that sued for release of the e-mails via the Freedom of Information Act. It may be impossible, ultimately, to restore all of the deleted e-mails due to funding limitations, and to date none of the recovered messages has been made public because they're still under review, but the fact remains that not all of them were permanently lost. As in Clinton's case, the Bush administration e-mails were sought as evidence in government investigations. No no charges were filed and no criminal wrongdoing was found in regard to Clinton's handling of e-mails. Bush aides were found in contempt of Congress for not complying with subpoenas in the U.S. attorney firings investigation, but no punishment was handed down.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}