Court: Private-account email can be subject to FOIA
On the same day that the FBI announced that the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server is likely to conclude without any charges, a federal appeals court issued a ruling that could complicate and prolong a slew of ongoing civil lawsuits over access to the messages Clinton and her top aides traded on personal accounts.
In a decision Tuesday in a case not involving Clinton directly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that messages contained in a personal email account can sometimes be considered government records subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
... At least one federal judge handling a FOIA suit focused on Clinton's emails
said last month he was watching to see how the D.C. Circuit ruled in the dispute involving Obama science adviser John Holdren and an account he kept on a server at the non-profit Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.
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While
the opinions in the case make no mention of Clinton or her private server, it seems evident that all three appeals judges involved are aware of the obvious analogy.
"If a department head can deprive the citizens of their right to know what his department is up to by the simple expedient of maintaining his departmental emails on an account in another domain, that purpose is hardly served. It would make as much sense to say that the department head could deprive requestors of hard-copy documents by leaving them in a file at his daughter’s house and then claiming that they are under her control," Judge David Sentelle wrote in an opinion joined by Judge Harry Edwards.
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