Well informed Kossacks like Lawrence Lewis and others have been aware of how law regarding email record retention in government changed just last year on November 26th. The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 included important new changes to laws, part of which hadn't been changed since 1950 despite over 6 decades of ever growing reliance of our government upon computers and electronic documents since then.
* Strengthening the Federal Records Act by expanding the definition of Federal records to clearly include electronic records. This is the first change to the definition of a Federal record since the enactment of the act in 1950.
* Confirming that Federal electronic records will be transferred to the National Archives in electronic form.
In a muddled account, the author of the NYT piece about Hillary's emails states early, in paragraph 2, this:
Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.
In that and other paragraphs, the article implies that the law regarding this area of record retention has not been changed.
Then with comments like the following it implies a seamless continuity of practice and the law - at least for this century:
“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business,” said Mr. Baron, who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.
We're also treated to tidbits like this:
The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.
Even while I condemn the tone of that smear it also has me thinking in snark that if it were true [snark] I can't imagine why the most scrutinized first family in US history might have a desire for some privacy. [/snark]
It isn't until the 22nd of this 28 paragraph POS that we learn that the law changed with regard to electronic documents in recent years. And it's used in a paragraph that appears to be for the purpose of letting Colin Powell off the hook. Did the NYT see fit to publish the date of The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014? It's a central fact for understanding what is going on.
No. Of course not. Not relevant apparently.
This is a great paper in the grand tradition of professional journalism [retch]. Ergo, I can only presume that the fact collecting portion of this article was assembled by riding the time machine back to before November 2014 to collect most of the "facts". There could be no other reason why this fine paper would miss such key information as the only update to the Federal Records Act in 64 years.
disclosure: I hope I never have to vote for Hillary. I don't want her for our Dem nominee. But I detest smear jobs like this by media outlets that pretend to fact based journalism.