Jindal’s aides had Clinton attitude on their ‘private emails’

16th March 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer

While campaigning for President last week, Louisiana Governor Piyush Jindal ripped into former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton’s habit of utilizing a private email account for government business. She defended her violations of Obama Administration policy requiring use of government servers as a matter of “convenience.”

Jindal was indignant. “I was almost waiting for her to say, ‘What difference does it make?’ I was actually waiting for her to say those words,” the Governor said, referencing a reply that Clinton made during a Congressional hearing on the 2012 murders of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi.

“I think there’s a bigger issue here,” Jindal elaborated. “From Benghazi, to this, to the Russia reset, there seems to be a lack of accountability…. There’s just a pattern here where bad things happen on her watch and she doesn’t take responsibility for it.”

Yet some of Jindal’s senior advisors also used private emails to conduct government business. And while Hillary Clinton broke the President’s stated policy, Jin­dal’s team may have run afoul of the state’s “Sunshine Law.” Not only did Jindal not made a move to fire them, the governor might very well have participated himself.

As the Associated Press’ Melinda Deslatte noted just over two years ago, top officials in the Jindal Administration employed personal email accounts to craft a media strategy for imposing hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid cuts. It was a method of communication, Deslatte noted, “that can make it more difficult to track under public records laws despite Jindal’s pledge to bring more transparency to state government.”

Emails reviewed by The As­so­ciated Press uncovered that non-state government email addresses were used dozens of times by state officials to communicate about a public relations offensive for making $523 million in healthcare cuts. Thickening the plot, those communiqués were excluded from a response to a public records request by the AP on that subject.

While Jindal was not included in the email discussions reviewed by the AP, his spokeswoman said the governor uses a private email account to communicate with immediate staff. That is exactly the behavior for which the Governor criticized Clinton.

The email exchanges in Louisiana occurred in the summer of 2012, as the Jindal administration plotted drastic reductions in hospital funding due to a fall in federal Medicaid funding. Over 50 conversations between Jindal’s top budget adviser Kristy Nichols, health care secretary Bruce Greenstein, Greenstein’s chief of staff and health policy adviser, and Jindal’s communications staff were conducted outside the state’s official email system.

Their writings explored subjects such as press releases, replies to news coverage of the budget cuts, opinion pieces to newspapers, and gripes about reporters’ coverage. These matters of governance were sent through accounts administered by Google and Yahoo.

In a telling exchange, Calder Lynch, a health policy adviser to Greenstein, directs a communications staffer to send certain types of items to Lynch’s personal Gmail account, rather than to use his state government email address.

In a marvelous piece of investigative journalism, Deslatte obtained the emails from an administration official “who participated in the discussions and who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to release them.”

“However, the emails in question weren’t among more than 3,800 documents and emails provided to AP by the Department of Health and Hospitals in response to a request for information on discussions surrounding the health care cuts,” she noted. “Louisiana’s public records law states that all documents used in ‘the conduct, transaction or performance’ of public business are considered public except in cases where there is a specific exemption. Administration officials didn’t respond directly to questions about whether they were using private email accounts to shield conversations about public business from disclosure.”

Nichols, the Governor’s top aide, was quoted in a statement, “Certainly we believe that conducting public business even when using personal means of communication is subject to public records law.”

Jindal spokeswoman Shannon Bates agreed with Nichols’ assessment and maintained the Administration encourages all officials to conduct state business on state accounts. But, Deslatte also added, “Bates didn’t directly answer an emailed question about why she and Jindal communications director Kyle Plotkin sent multiple group emails in July to Greenstein, Nichols and DHH employees using their personal email accounts when talking about news organizations’ coverage of the Medicaid budget cuts.”

DHH spokeswoman Kristen Sunde told the AP that the department agrees “any state issues discussed over electronic communication are subject to public records law, regardless of the type of account used.”

Deslatte added with just a bit of irony, “It’s unclear how department attorneys and computer experts who do the leg work in responding to public records requests would know to check individual employees’ personal email accounts for documents complying with a request.”

“Sunde didn’t answer a question about why the emails that involved non-state accounts weren’t included in the agency’s response to AP’s public records request. She said DHH staff uses state email accounts for work-related matters, but may use a personal account if employees are working remotely, have limited access from a mobile device or are encountering difficulties with the state email server. Nichols offered a similar explanation.”

In a July 27 email exchange, six administration officials discussed how to respond to revelation of the budget cuts. Nichols, then Jindal’s deputy chief of staff, spoke of the importance of employing the term “long-term strategic reform” in the official administration response. Plotkin, the governor’s top communications aide, eliminated the word “challenging” from a description of the cuts.

Greenstein said he would limit his statements to those formulated with the governor’s office to respond to the healthcare cuts. In a series of emails on July 13 and 14, Plotkin urged Greenstein and his staff to “pen an op-ed from Bruce for all papers on why LSU hospitals need to transform the way they do biz now with this loss of money.”

Employing his personal Gmail account, Plotkin shot out an email to the personal accounts of five DHH employees reading, “We need to get out front on this message.” In another set of conversations about a requested newspaper correction, Lynch, one of Greenstein’s top advisers, told a department spokesman not to use a state government email account.

“Please be careful to send stuff from Kyle like what you just sent …. only to my Gmail. May have accidentally hit my state addy (address), but they are very particular,” Lynch wrote.

Deslatte concluded, “When running for office in 2007, Jindal campaigned on improving government transparency in a state known for its backroom political deals, imprisoned elected officials and ongoing investigations into public corruption. Since then, the governor has opposed attempts to open more of his office’s records to public scrutiny, and agencies in his executive branch have exerted new claims of privilege to shield documents.”

Both Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin used private emails, and faced court rulings requiring them to disclose the contents to state archives.

This article originally published in the March 16, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.