‘Nuclear winter’ is the only excuse, says one lawyer The slightest whiff of blood, and the sharks are circling. Monica Crawley of Fox News tweets: “Holy Crap!” BuzzFeed’s John Passantino says: “Uh oh!” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza contends that it “plays into everything people don’t like about her.” Then there’s Gawker’s John Cook, who says, effectively, whatever — “we’ve known for two years.” They’re all talking about Hillary Clinton and the New York Times report that the presumed presidential hopeful used her personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, according to State Department officials. By doing so, she may have run afoul of requirements that her correspondence be retrained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton didn’t even have a government email address during her four-year tenure at Foggy Bottom, the report says. In an effort to comply after the fact with federal record-keeping practices, Clinton’s advisers eventually pored over tens of thousands of her personal emails and decided to turn over some 55,000 pages of them to the department.‘It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for ... government business.’ Jason Baron Her use of the private account is seen by many as a serious breach. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its Cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” Jason Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath, told the New York Times. He said that she’s not the first government official to use a personal email account, but her exclusive use of hers is what’s troubling. A Clinton spokesman came to her defense, saying she has been complying with both the “letter and spirit of the rules.” But Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, explained why high-ranking officials need to be held to that standard: “Personal emails are not secure,” he told the Times. “Senior officials should not be using them.” http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hillary-clinton-and-the-pri...