, Columnist
If Business Is Open to Scrutiny, Government Should Be Too
How much disclosure should be required? That's a fair question, but the standard should be the same.
Where leaders live.
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As the revelations about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail practices have mounted, her supporters have hit on a counterintuitive defense: perhaps she shouldn’t have had to disclose them anyway. This argument basically has three prongs:
The first argument doesn’t really work. Did we exempt phone calls because we wanted to give officials a safe harbor from public scrutiny, or because they’re really hard to file, index, and search? Now that we have the digital tools to do that, maybe this is an argument, not for exempting e-mails from disclosure requirements, but for including phone calls and meetings.