SALEM, Ore. – The types of transparency questions surrounding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of personal email to conduct business while secretary of state have led in recent years to access fights in state capitals throughout the country.
Governors and other elected officials routinely use private emails, laptops and cellphones for government business, a popular strategy that sometimes helps them avoid public scrutiny of their actions.
Open-records fights over private emails have had varying results.
“It’s an issue that’s becoming increasingly prevalent as we all have more and more accounts on social media and email,” said Adam Marshall, a legal fellow on open government for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “I think it’s a real and serious problem at all levels of government across the nation.”
Most state transparency laws were written before electronic communications were common, and they vary significantly in how they handle public business conducted through private accounts and devices.
Even in states requiring disclosure, it’s tough to know whether officials are disclosing all relevant records when they are the only ones to have access.
The most recent statehouse skirmish over private emails is unfolding in Oregon, where former Gov. John Kitzhaber and his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes, are fighting on multiple fronts to keep their emails out of the public eye and away from federal investigators.
Kitzhaber, a Democrat, resigned last month amid suspicions that Hayes used the governor’s office to land contracts for her green-energy consulting business. She earned more than $200,000 from advocacy groups while serving as a volunteer adviser to the governor.
Emails from several personal accounts Kitzhaber used were archived on state servers, a move he says was inadvertent. Shortly before he resigned, a staffer tried to have them erased, but technicians refused, and they were later leaked to Willamette Week, a Portland alternative newspaper.
Separately, Kitzhaber’s fiancée filed a lawsuit against The Oregonian in Portland in an attempt to protect her own emails from a public-records request. The state’s attorney general has ordered that she give the newspaper emails from the multiple private accounts she used to interact with state officials.
Revelations this week that Clinton used her personal email account extensively to conduct official business have raised questions about whether she violated the language or spirit of transparency rules as she considers a 2016 presidential run. A State Department spokeswoman said no law prohibited Clinton from using her own email to conduct government business.
On Friday, the Obama administration said it would determine what parts of her official emails will be released publicly from her private account.
Government transparency advocates say the public has a right to know what their elected officials are doing with their tax dollars.
“If they can hide their communications and obscure what’s going on in the discharge of their public offices by using personal email accounts, they are denying the public a fundamental right of transparency to understand what they’re doing,” said James Chadwick, a media and intellectual property lawyer in Palo Alto, California.
