WASHINGTON -- Appearing on Fox News Sunday, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee questioned whether it was legal for former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to use a private email account rather than one provided by the State Department.
Last week the New York Times reported that the potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate had used a private server to store emails during her four years as secretary of state. Longtime Clinton defender and crisis management expert Lanny Davis appeared on the show after Huckabee and said Clinton didn't do anything illegal or wrong.
Multiple news shows over the past few days have hosted people questioning whether the private email use violated federal laws or policies regarding archiving and storing public documents.
"There's a protocol that she didn't follow, that was a directive from within the Obama administration," Huckabee said Sunday. "There's also some legal issues about whether or not it's a good idea, even a lawful idea to store top secret information to which the secretary of state would be privy to [on a] personal server in a personal home away from all the firewalls that the government would provide."
Huckabee, who is considering his own 2016 presidential bid, said storing sensitive emails in a private account may have left Clinton vulnerable to hackers.
"In the position of secretary of state, one has to understand that they would be a serious target for being hacked and we've seen how easy it is for some of these foreign entities or even domestic entities to hack into private email accounts. That's problematic and it could compromise national security," he said.
Clinton turned over all emails related to public business to the State Department in December and, after the first New York Times article was published, asked that the emails be made available to the public, Davis said.
Davis said Huckabee is wrong about the private email use being against the law, saying the law wasn't changed to require federal employees to work through official government emails until 2014, after Clinton left the State Department. He said Clinton did nothing wrong, pointing to previous secretaries of state like Colin Powell who have said they used private email accounts while serving and didn't save the emails.
"She also did nothing illegal and Gov. Huckabee suggested that she might," Davis said. "You're discussing a nonscandal, nothing illegal, full access. It's all politics."
Davis said using personal email was a matter of convenience when Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace questioned why Clinton used personal email after instructing State Department employees to use their government email only in a 2011 memo.
"I can explain that by saying that a secretary of state traveling to 111 countries might be needing to have one email system versus people in the department who should use the official system."
Huckabee said some people will continue to question if she turned over all relevant emails.
"The fact is we really don't know because if she's the only one who has access to them, she can redact what she wants," he said. "Even if she does turn them over there's going to be accusations that that's not all there is."
Wallace suggested that perhaps a third party, such as an inspector general or a retired judge, should go through Clinton's emails and determine whether all work-related emails were submitted.
Huckabee agreed the Clintons may have to allow such a review, but he said he doesn't think it will make the issue go away.
"Once this shadow of doubt has been placed I think it's going to linger throughout a presidential campaign should she decide to run," he said.
Davis said a neutral third party could be brought in to review the emails.
"I think that is a reasonable idea," he said. "If the State Department asks she will say yes, if there is a subpoena she must say yes."
Huckabee was named in a 2003 case that set precedent regarding private email use by state public officials. In Randall R. Bradford v. Director Employment Security Department and Department of Information Systems, a former state employee seeking unemployment benefits also accused Huckabee of trying to circumvent public scrutiny by communicating through a private email account. The Arkansas Court of Appeals ruled that emails discussing public business were subject to the state's Freedom of Information Act regardless of whether they were sent through private or government email accounts.
When asked about the case, Huckabee's spokesman, Alice Stewart, commented on an appeal of that case from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Arkansas that was dismissed. Bradford appealed the unemployment benefit decision, not the private email question. Stewart declined to address the state case.
"The governor's office followed the law, and common sense, and actions were upheld by the courts when the lawsuit was thrown out," she said.
Huckabee said on the show that it is problematic that Clinton got a say in what emails were turned over to the State Department and to the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
"If you are depending on somebody who is under investigation to be in charge of the investigation, you don't have much of an investigation," he said. "It just doesn't have the credibility."
Sunday wasn't the first time Huckabee has questioned whether Clinton broke the law. At the Iowa Ag Summit in Des Moines on Saturday, Huckabee told The Hill, a political website, that her email use should be investigated to see if she broke any laws.
On the show, Huckabee called the situation "very familiar" to people who have interacted with Bill and Hillary Clinton politically over the past 40 years.
"I know what it is to face what is an extraordinary political machine," Huckabee said. "I'm not bitter about it, because frankly, my attitude has been, look, these are people who know how to play politics. They play to win, they use every tool at their disposal to win."
Huckabee paraphrased a quote from the 1972 mobster film The Godfather, saying it's not personal, it's business.
"It's a tough business, and when you challenge the Clinton political machine, whether it's in Arkansas or anywhere else, you better be up for one heck of a fight," he said.
Though cleared of any wrongdoing by the state's attorney general, Huckabee has been criticized for having his staff physically destroy 91 hard drives when he left the governor's office in early 2007, an issue raised again by the Democratic Party of Arkansas on Sunday.
"Secretary Clinton's record of transparency and disclosure is second to none, and she should not be held to a different standard. Gov. Huckabee, on the other hand, has a history of deliberately withholding information -- going as far as to destroy computer hard drives from his office after his 10 years of serving as governor," party Executive Director Candace Miller said.
Metro on 03/09/2015