Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's claim that government employees decide which emails are public and private is "fundamentally not true," says Margaret Hoover, who served in the George W. Bush administration.
"I've been a government employee for the federal government," Hoover said Tuesday on CNN. "When we're a federal government employee, we are forced to use a dot-gov email account so that all of those records are in the hands of the federal government and they can be FOIA-requested or available to the public at any given moment should they be sought."
Clinton is not in that position because she not only used private email for her work, but also owns the server on which the emails were stored.
"Government employees don't have private servers in their homes and then become the sole arbiters of what is relevant to the public or not," Hoover said. "That's the crux of the problem here, and I don't think that she answered that."