Myriad challenges for record-keepers
In debate over what to keep, Clinton emails latest target.
The dust-up over access to Hillary Clinton’s emails is causing government recordkeepers to take stock of new challenges they face,
— In the WASHINGTON quest to preserve the government’s history, there have been plenty of weapons of mass destruction.
Before “delete” keys on computers, there were paper shredders, erase buttons on tape recorders and trash cans.
Think Oliver North jamming a shredder with papers from an 18-inch stack of documents during the Iran-contra investigation, which dealt with secret arms sales to Iran and illegal U.S. support for Nicaraguan rebels during the Reagan administration.
Or the 18 ½-minute gap in President Richard Nixon’s White House tapes.
The current dust-up over access to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails as secretary of state is causing historians and government record-keepers to take stock of the new challenges they face in trying to save government records.
In the age of email, texting, Twitter and beyond, there are more records than ever on the workings of government.
At the same time, though, it’s easy to make those records disappear, and it’s challenging to (ind a manageable way to capture what’s signi(icant and cull the chaff.
There’s also a tendency by wary government of(icials to pre-emptively cover their tracks by avoiding the creation of records in the (irst place.
Add that all up, says Princeton history and public affairs professor Julian Zelizer, and “a lot of historians are worried about how we’ll really understand what went on when the record is becoming thinner.”
The National Archives’ Paul Wester, chief records of(icer for the government, acknowledges that “the situation is not as good as we would like it to be.”
Wester says the archivists were surprised by revelations that Clinton had used only a personal email account and server during her days as secretary of state, raising concerns that “federal records may have been alienated from the Department of State’s of(icial record-keeping systems,” as he put it in a letter to the department this month.
Clinton has said she used a personal email account for convenience, not to hide records. She says she turned over all government-related emails to the State Department and deleted tens of thousands that were personal.
The Republican leading a House investigation of the 2012 attacks against Americans in Benghazi, Libya, when Clinton was secretary of state, said Friday that Clinton had wiped her email server “clean,” permanently deleting all emails from it.
But Clinton’s lawyer said the department had all her work-related emails from the personal account.
Historian Luke Nichter of Texas A&M University-Central Texas, said the episode demonstrates that record preservation rules are as flawed now as they were in Nixon’s time.
He’s particularly concerned that individual agencies and, in some cases, individual of(icials draw the line between what records should be part of the public record and what’s personal.
He adds that Nixon’s downfall, sealed by his taped conversations, taught modern politicians the value of “pre-emptive sanitization” — circumventing the records process — and they’re still at it today.