WH: No comparison between Pence, Clinton email
The White House on Friday said it’s unfair to compare Vice President Pence’s use of a private email address to conduct state business as Indiana governor to Hillary Clinton’s home email server setup.
“It was an apples to oranges comparison,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters aboard Air Force One.
“He was a governor, not a federal employee, which means the laws are different,” she continued. “He did everything to the letter of the law in Indiana, turned all his emails over unlike Hillary Clinton, at least 30,000 on her private server and classified information was found.”
{mosads}The Indianapolis Star’s report that Pence used an AOL account to communicate with top advisers, including on sensitive topics like homeland security, sparked charges of hypocrisy against the vice president.
Pence was critical of Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct business as secretary of State throughout the 2016 presidential race.
“.@realDonaldTrump and I commend the FBI for reopening an investigation into Clinton’s personal email server because no one is above the law,” Pence tweeted on Oct. 28.
But there are numerous differences between the two situations.
Indiana law does not bar public officials from using private email accounts, but they are expected to retain those communications for public records requests.
Federal employees, on the other hand, are strongly discouraged from using personal accounts for work purposes.
Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said he directed his lawyers “to review all of his communications to ensure that state-related emails are being transferred and properly archived by the state, in accordance with the law.”
Clinton deleted almost half of her private email archive, claiming they were personal in nature. But an FBI investigation later turned up thousands of work-related emails that were not turned over to the State Department.
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