Maddow: Not Releasing Emails More a ‘Governmental Matter’ than Hillary’s Fault

‘The State Department is terrible when it comes to dealing with Freedom of Information Act requests’

"It’s interesting because, as you noted earlier this hour, it’s true that it’s the responsibility, as Secretary Clinton said yesterday, of each federal employee who does official business on a personal email account. It’s the responsibility of that employee to hand that e-mail over to the relevant department so it can be archived for the purposes of public records. She said she did that.

There isn’t an independent system by which those things get verified for any employee, including Cabinet secretaries. So that’s true. There’s all these people questioning whether or not she made the right decision as to what was personal or work related. I’m not sure that can be litigated. I'm not sure that there is means by which that will that will ever be sorted out to anybody satisfaction.

But then you also have the gentlemen, the Republican congressman Mike Pompeo from the Benghazi Committee saying he has no interest in any personal e-mails. The Republican Chair of that Committee Tray Gowdy saying on our network this morning  he wants the whole server. He wants to be the one who goes through all her personal e-mails and decide to his satisfaction what counts as personal and what doesn’t. It’s never going to happen.

The State Department does have a responsibility to make sure its public responsibilities are met. The State Department is terrible when it comes to dealing with Freedom of Information Act. That's not just in respect to the Secretary, but with respect to everything and that is a governmental matter that has to be addressed separate and above the question of what counts as yoga and what counts as diplomacy in Hillary Clinton's own view of her own emails."

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