Court rules government can’t use private emails to hide from transparency

The Washington Times reports:

A federal appeals court issued a stinging rebuke to a top Obama White House official Tuesday, saying he can’t hide his emails from public scrutiny merely by shifting them to a non-government account.

The ruling, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, is likely to give investigators, reporters and the public a major new tool in forcing transparency on government officials who are appear to be increasingly using private accounts to conduct official business.

In a stunning coincidence, the ruling was issued just minutes before the FBI announced it was not recommending criminal charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her own use of a secret email server, which hid all of her government emails from public view for nearly six years.

In the case before the D.C. circuit, Mr. Obama’s top science adviser, John Holdren, refused to turn over emails from his account at his other job at the Woods Hole Research Center. He said that that because that account wasn’t run by the government, neither he nor his agency had no right to search it for his own government-related emails.

But the judges rejected that as illogical, saying it would have created a bizarre loophole in the law.

“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,” Judge David B. Sentelle said in the court’s opinion. “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.”

Imagine that.