INTENT WAS TO ‘E-VADE’ADE
Ex-info czar rips Hill
What she did was contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law.
— Daniel Metcalfe, who ran the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy from 1981 to 2007
WASHINGTON — The official who was the US government’s top Freedom of Information Act expert for a quartercentury has blasted Hillary Rodham Clinton’s justification for setting up a private email system for her government work as “laughable.”
“What she did was contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law,” said Daniel Metcalfe, who ran the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy from 1981 to 2007, a period spanning the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations.
“There is no doubt that the scheme she established was a blatant circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act, atop the Federal Records Act,” he said in scalding comments to the Canadian Press Wednesday.
Metcalfe added that if he had learned of a Cabinet officer setting up an email system like Clinton’s, “I would’ve said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’
“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.”
Clinton said Tuesday that she deleted about half her cache of 60,000 emails written while she was secretary of state, turning over to the State Department those messages she and her counsel deemed official.
Clinton insisted she followed all the federal rules in effect at the time.
After reviewing a transcript of Clinton’s remarks, Metcalfe pointed to 23 instances where what she said was “deceptive,” “grossly misleading” or impossible to verify.
“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,” said Metcalfe, who now teaches government information law at American University in DC.
Other experts also weren’t buying Clinton’s explanation that she used private email strictly to avoid carrying more than one mobile device.
“I do not believe it was for convenience. I just have to believe that it was because she didn’t want anybody to have access to the information,” Richard Schaffer, who directed the office of information assurance at the National Security Agency, told The Post.