Court rules government can’t use private emails

A federal appeals court issued a stinging rebuke to a top Obama White House official Tuesday, saying he can’t hide his emails from public scrutiny merely by shifting them to a non-government account.

The ruling, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, gives a major boost to investigators, reporters and members of the public who are trying to pry information from federal officials who appear to be increasingly turning to private email systems to conduct official business.

In a stunning coincidence, the ruling was issued just minutes before the FBI announced it was not recommending criminal charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her own use of a secret email server, which hid all of her government emails from public view for nearly six years.

In the case before the D.C. circuit, Mr. Obama’s top science adviser, John Holdren, refused to turn over emails from his account at his other job at the Woods Hole Research Center. He said that that because that account wasn’t run by the government, neither he nor his agency had the right to search it.

But the judges rejected that as illogical, saying Mr. Holdren is the head of the agency and he has to be able to go through his own account. Otherwise, they said, it would have created a bizarre loophole in the law.

“If a department head can deprive the citizens of their right to know what his department is up to by the simple expedient of maintaining his departmental emails on an account in another domain, that purpose is hardly s