White House: No comparison between Pence, Clinton e-mail

The White House said it’s unfair to compare Vice President Pence’s use of a private e-mail address to conduct state business as Indiana governor to Hillary Clinton’s home e-mail server setup. “It was an apples to oranges comparison,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. "He was a governor, not a federal employee, which means the laws are different,” she continued. “He did everything to the letter of the law in Indiana, turned all his emails over unlike Hillary Clinton, at least 30,000 on her private server and classified information was found.”

There are numerous differences between the two situations. Indiana law does not bar public officials from using private email accounts, but they are expected to retain those communications for public records requests. Federal employees, on the other hand, are strongly discouraged from using personal accounts for work purposes. Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said he directed his lawyers “to review all of his communications to ensure that state-related emails are being transferred and properly archived by the state, in accordance with the law.” Clinton deleted almost half of her private email archive, claiming they were personal in nature. But an FBI investigation later turned up thousands of work-related emails that were not turned over to the State Department.