That US presidents are willing to completely give up email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) seems pretty shady. I could see if they were mob bosses running a criminal organization but "public servants" - really?
Not one tech company in the world publishes all (or really, any) of the work emails of their executives, and that's exactly what the records act does to the President.
Access to presidential records is actually quite restricted including a 12 year delay in most cases[1]. I think the article is incorrect that a FOIA request could force the president to produce an email.
And unlike tech execs and anyone else the president is not subject to search warrants or subpoenas in many cases due to "executive privilege"[2].
The PRISM program, which captures a huge fraction of world email traffic, is "the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief" according to the NSA[3]. Reading other people's email on a regular basis probably makes you cautious about your own email habits rather than being worried about FOIA requests you can probably ignore.
Despite all of these protections our presidents still feel they have to take the extraordinary step of not using email at all. Very shady.
I think the logic goes along the lines of "better safe than sorry". They can make do fine without email, they have really smart people with good memories that can make this all happen in non-record-producing conversations, so why create the paper trail?
It doesn't even mean they're being shady, I mean they are, but 99% of the time we're talking about routine conversation. What if you had a bunch of people trying to do a hatchet job on you, ready to take any sentence out of context and leak it?
There are limits to executive privilege, as Nixon discovered. That's why the White House isn't routinely bugged anymore, much to the consternation of historians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability