WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton reportedly never had a government email account while she was secretary of state, exclusively using a personal email address to conduct official business, State Department officials say.
The New York Times reports that while Clinton is not the first secretary of state to use a personal email account for official business, her aides never had her personal emails preserved on department servers. That may be a violation of federal requirements that such correspondence be retained so they can be read by Congress, historians and media members.
Two months ago, Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of emails, the Times says, and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department as part of a department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices. But that doesn’t go as far as the federal requirements require, and the Times says it isn’t known how her advisers decided which emails to turn over.
Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, told the Times that she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.” He didn’t say why Clinton had made the choice not to use a government account. He said that since her emails to other State Department officials would be preserved by the recipients’ government accounts, she had “every expectation that they would be retained.”
Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a group based at George Washington University that advocates government transparency, says that “Personal emails are not secure. Senior officials should not be using them.”
Current Secretary of State John Kerry uses a government email account, the Times says, and all his correspondence is being saved. Colin Powell used personal email during his tenure from 2001-2005, but the current requirements weren’t in effect then.
