Government official roles and responsibilities

Ethics Example

The author of this report has been asked to select and summarize the ethical charges against any politician in recent memory. One that is very recent in that it is going on right would be the ethical and legal mess that Hillary Clinton would seem to be in right now as it relates to her email server. Indeed, Ms. Clinton had a personal email server prepared and maintained and she used that server to do her business as Secretary of State. While it is not completely clear as of yet whether Hillary will face charges or if she broke the law, she certainly has received some unwanted attention from the top intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Even if nothing Hillary did was illegal, one of her main "sins" would be that of transparency and ethics in general as a public official. Of course, one of the common facets of being a public official is that all correspondence conducted via email and other electronic means is often subject to public review through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and so forth. When it comes to jobs that involve confidential material, this is not always the case and the position of Secretary of State is certainly a job where that would occur a lot. However, there is also oversight and review from people that do have the right to demand such confidential information such as many of the committees in the House and Senate of the United States Congress. The main point to glean is that keeping a personal server is seen as a way to obfuscate information from the public and/or regulatory committees that would want to monitor and review what the executive branch of the United States government is up to (Wilstein, 2015; Hemingway, 2015).

Hillary has complicated her situation greatly, both ethically and criminally, when it comes to the fact that a lot of emails are being forwarded in a piecemeal fashion and it is fairly apparent that many emails are being deleted. Beyond that, the time periods during which emails are being "wiped" seem to coincide with some of the nastier events of her tenure of Secretary of State such as during Benghazi. Again, people that serve the public in the form of being public officials have to be very careful about doing things in ways that are not above board. Hillary is far from the first public official to face this issue. Indeed, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin face much the same accusations and ethical charges when she was in office (Wilstein, 2015; Hemingway, 2015).

However, Hillary is certainly facing some legal issues as well. Indeed, one of the agencies that is reviewing her email server and what happened on it is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). At issue is what information is being forwarded, to whom it is being forwarded and whether the information was being handled in the right way overall. Indeed, the people that view and exchange top secret and other confidential information must have the security clearance to do so. Hillary herself is not yet facing charges but her aide that set up the server is planning to invoke the Fifth Amendment if/when the person is brought to testify and that is not exactly a good sign (Wilstein, 2015; Hemingway, 2015).