Over the past few weeks, the American public has heard little but news regarding Hillary Clinton’s usage of a non-government authorized email account for official business. Audiences have watched the scandal unfold as more details become available. Just Saturday, it was revealed that a close aide to President Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, was responsible for leaking the email situation.

To some, the email controversy is just the Republican Party looking for distractions within Clinton’s potential presidential campaign. However, that is not the case. This scandal speaks to more than just Clinton’s violation of protocol; it speaks to the lack of transparency and communication within our government.

Last week, the president said he learned about this issue with Clinton’s emails through the media. The fact that the president was not aware of a cabinet member blatantly breaching protocol is astonishing. The public likes to think of the president and his cabinet as a tight-knit group of people that works together to protect our country. This revelation disproves the utopian ideal held by many.

That doesn’t mean that the president is solely at fault here. I mean, what are the chances of Obama checking his own email? As president, he wears many hats, so it’s understandable that he can’t see everything going on. But it’s assumed that cabinet members talk to one another.

Clinton isn’t just the former secretary of state: she has turned into a pop culture icon. As the cool kid of the cabinet, I guess it’s safe to say Clinton was taking selfies, shopping for pant suits and doing nothing to stop the Benghazi attacks all on her personal BlackBerry. Regardless of her newfound popularity, she is not exempt from following the rules.

This isn’t the first time a political figure has been in a similar situation. Former vice presidential candidate and Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin was in this predicament when in 2008 it was discovered that she was using two email accounts to conduct official business. When the Clinton scandal broke, she had a few words for her.

“An honest politician has nothing to fear from the public seeing her emails,” said Palin in her op-ed on FoxNews.com. Palin is absolutely correct. Clinton should have responded in a more prompt and clear manner to avoid such backlash and to fast-track the process of releasing her emails.

There are stark differences between Palin and Clinton’s email controversies: Palin swiftly complied with the Freedom of Information Act requests to make her emails public. Clinton, on the other hand, is taking her time. In addition to that, Clinton’s email address is hosted on a private server, which she controls. This is where the problem lies — there is no way to be certain of what Mrs. Clinton was doing as secretary of state.

Like Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.” If the American people want to see Hillary Clinton’s emails, then they have every right to. The American people have the right to know what our government leaders are doing, but unfortunately, much of their business is done behind closed doors. Our leaders don’t communicate their decisions to the public, which is becoming a serious problem.

Transparency and communication must be improved upon, otherwise more problems within the government will occur. When leaders of our nation don’t comply with the rules they’re hired to uphold, they break the trust that the American people put in them. Once that trust is broken, it takes years to repair.

Vanessa Salman is a sophomore policy studies major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at vksalman@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @VanessaSalman.

Published on March 18, 2015 at 12:10 am