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The revelation yesterday by the New York Times that Hillary Clinton used her personal email account to hide thousands of public records — that’s what they are, you know — won’t come as a surprise to open-government advocates who know public officials exploit this loophole every day.
The news is that this practice has now risen to the highest level of our federal government, where it’s expressly forbidden.
At state and local levels, however, legislatures and courts have abetted this secrecy by failing to adopt laws to prevent it and interpreting existing laws to favor the privacy of elected officials over the public’s right to know how they’re conducting business.
This is true of cell phone records as well as emails.
When it’s been tested, judges have ruled that — unless a statute specifically says they are public records — the emails and phone records of public officials when they use private phones or accounts, even for public business, can be kept confidential.
That’s a loophole big enough to drive an entire state through, as the governor of Colorado demonstrated by conducting most of his public business on a private cell and refusing to release his phone records.
In the federal rules, there is an exception for emergencies. No quarrel there, as anybody might get a phone call in the middle of the night on a private line.
But if officials are going to mingle their private lives with their public responsibility, they should expect to reveal both. If they don’t want us nosing into their private affairs, then they should use government-provided email accounts and phones to conduct their public affairs.
Until then, we’ll have what has become the status quo: Deliberations, decisions and policy by public officials through serial emails and phone calls kept secret from the public in violation of open-meeting and open-record laws.