Clinton's initial response. Clinton addressing email controversy with the media at the UN Headquarters on March 10, 2015. Clinton's spokesman Nick Merrill defended Clinton's usage of her personal server and email accounts as being in compliance with the "letter and spirit of the rules.".
Datto, Inc. , which provided data backup service for Clinton's email, agreed to give the FBI the hardware that stored the backups. As of May 2016, no answer had been provided to the public as to whether 31,000 emails deleted by Hillary Clinton as personal have been or could be recovered.
Clinton's server was found to hold over 100 emails containing classified information, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". An additional 2,093 emails not marked classified were retroactively designated confidential by the State Department.
Code § 1924, regarding the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials, as well as State Department protocols and procedures, and regulations governing recordkeeping. Clinton claimed that her use complied with federal laws and State Department regulations, and that former secretaries of state had also maintained personal email accounts (however Clinton was the only secretary of state to use a private server ). News reports by NBC and CNN indicated that the emails discussed "innocuous" matters already available in the public domain. For example, the CIA drone program has been widely discussed in the public domain since the early 2000s; however, the existence of the program is technically classified, so sharing a newspaper article that mentions it would constitute a security breach, according to the CIA.
Clinton herself stated she had done so as a matter of "convenience."
The controversy was a major point of discussion and contention during the 2016 presidential election, in which Clinton was the Democratic nominee. In May, the State Department's Office of the Inspector General released a report about the State Department's email practices, including Clinton's.
Hillary Clinton holding a BlackBerry phone in 2009. Prior to her appointment as Secretary of State in 2009, Clinton and her circle of friends and colleagues communicated via BlackBerry phones. State Department security personnel suggested this would pose a security risk during her tenure.
A day after charging former Clinton business partner Susan McDougal with criminal contempt and obstruction, the Little Rock grand jury that has been investigating Whitewater for 4 1/2 years disbanded without issuing more indictments.
The decision made Clinton the first president to take a claim of executive privilege to court and lose since the dramatic Watergate showdown in 1974, when the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Richard M. Nixon to turn over the secret Oval Office tapes that ultimately led to his resignation. Clinton's case also seems headed for the high court as sources indicated that the White House likely will appeal.
That case involved Starr's efforts to subpoena notes taken by White House lawyers in discussions with Hillary Clinton during 1995 and 1996. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Starr that government lawyers cannot be enlisted in private defense work and the Supreme Court refused a White House request to hear an appeal.
The White House has 10 days to file a notice of appeal of the latest privilege ruling. If Clinton's lawyers seek a hearing in the appeals court, Starr likely would ask the Supreme Court to grant an immediate hearing instead, just as Watergate prosecutors did. The White House may decide to forgo an appeal rather than run the risk of a highly visible defeat on the executive privilege issue in the Supreme Court.
While Starr has been criticized by the White House for spending four years and more than $30 million on his investigation, yesterday's ruling underlines how much of his resources have been absorbed fighting various court challenges. In nine instances, witnesses or defendants -- including the White House, McDougal and former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker -- have challenged criminal convictions or court rulings, only to be rebuffed by the courts.
Johnson's ruling could amount to a significant political as well as legal setback for Clinton, lending ammunition to Republican critics , such as House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), who have charged that Clinton is trying, in Nixonian fashion, to impede Starr's investigation with invalid privilege claims.
While presidents have claimed a form of executive privilege to shield their internal deliberations since George Washington, the Nixon ruling in 1974 was the seminal case establishing that such a privilege exists and setting the broad parameters of White House secrecy for the modern era.
Palmer Water Dept., a Massachusetts federal magistrate judge held that the employer had waived the attorney-client privilege because its outside counsel actively managed another attorney’s investigation of a sexual harassment complaint. This should serve as a reminder to employers to consider the boundaries of the attorney-client privilege, at the outset of every investigation, when deciding how to staff and manage the investigation, so as to minimize the risk of having to disclose confidential information.
A recent court decision vividly illustrates why employers should give careful consideration to the attorney-client privilege before conducting an investigation in the workplace – to avoid unexpectedly having to disclose confidential information.
Specifically, the town asserted the Faragher-Ellerth affirmative defense, which (as established by the U.S. Supreme Court) allows an employer to avoid vicarious liability for a hostile work environment allegedly created by a supervisor’s conduct, if the employer can prove that (1) the employer exercised reasonable care to prevent and promptly correct any harassing behavior, and (2) the employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventative or corrective opportunities provided by the employer. Thus, the town put its investigation “into issue” in the case.
The employer should carefully evaluate the likelihood that litigation will occur . This “big picture” analysis will help the employer determine whether an inadvertent waiver of the attorney-client privilege may be a significant danger and, if so, how that hazard can best be minimized or avoided.
The employer may want to create, at the outset, a formal investigation document, to clearly differentiate the role of the investigator (who will be performing the fact-gathering) from the role of the outside attorney (who will be advising the employer on its response to the results of the investigation).
Taking these steps, both before and during an investigation, will help an employer maximize its chances of avoiding an unintentional disclosure of confidential information.
The plaintiff eventually moved to compel production of documents related to the town’s investigation. And the town maintained that documents reflecting the town’s regular law firm’s involvement in the investigation were protected from disclosure under the attorney-client privilege.