Open government advocates are criticizing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for using only her personal e-mail account to conduct government business. Under the Federal Records Act, all official correspondence must be kept as part of the public record. The only exemptions are for classified information and certain other sensitive issues. In January Clinton’s advisers reviewed thousands of pages of e-mails and provided 55,000 of them to the State Department in an attempt to comply with federal requirements. (The New York Times, March 2, 2015, by Michael S. Schmidt)
Using a private e-mail account to do business meant that Clinton’s official e-mails were not archived on government servers and accordingly not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests starting in 2008. (Politico, March 2, 2015, by Josh Gerstein)