I would like to write to Secretary of State Clinton, can you provide a current mailing address Mrs. Stacy Johnson?

Again, Clinton is confusing the public office with the private person. This is wrong. The unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official running her own email server would have given Clinton – who is expected to run for president in the 2016 campaign – significant control over limiting access to her message archives.

The practice also would complicate the State Department’s legal responsibilities in finding and turning over official emails in response to any investigations, lawsuits or public records requests. The department would be in the position of accepting Clinton’s assurances she was surrendering everything required that was in her control. In other words, public ownership of Clinton’s email is only nominal, because in practice her staff controls what the public can see.

“Her staff did the sorting, but what the law requires is for a government official to do the sorting,” said Tom Blanton, the head of the National Security Archive, a group that uses FOIA requests and lawsuits to uncover government actions. “There are other motivations going on here, and she should have been on notice.” At the request of the State Department, Mrs. Clinton turned over about 50,000 pages of emails from clintonemail.com related to the government issues late last year.

But her aides have declined to describe the process by which they selected which emails to hand over and which to hold back, and public records experts have expressed alarm that Mrs. Clinton’s correspondence was not being preserved as part of the State Department record-keeping system while she was in office. “It seems her intent was to create a system where she could personally manage access to her communications,” said John Wonderlich, policy director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates transparency in government. Meanwhile, the AP said it was considering legal action under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act against the State Department for failing to turn over some emails covering Clinton’s tenure as the nation’s top diplomat after waiting more than one year.

The department has never suggested that it doesn’t possess all Clinton’s emails. “The law is clear, however, that agencies do not — merely by way of the employer/employee relationship — gain ‘control’ over their employees’ personal e-mail accounts,” U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled Tuesday in the case brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “That is precisely why agencies admonish their employees to use their official accounts for government business.”

Summing up: We’ve got Secretary of State putting public property — the email they sent in their capacity as a Constitutional officer — under private control — their server. When when they leave office, that public property is still on that server, under their private control, and is released only as staff determines, under a process that is not explained, and cannot be verified. If that isn’t converting public property to private use, it’s hard to see what else it would be.