During her time as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton never had an official government email address.
Though Clinton is not the first government official nor the first secretary of state to use a personal email to do official business, her aides failed to preserve her personal emails on department servers, something required by the Federal Records Act, according to the New York Times.
Her use of a personal email address was discovered during the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation into the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya.
Attempting to comply with federal recordkeeping requirements, the State Department requested the emails; Clinton’s advisers turned over 55,000 pages of her personal emails to the department only two months ago, after reviewing tens of thousands of pages of them.
It is unclear how many emails were not given to the State Department.
Furthermore, federal law mandates letters and emails written and received by federal officials — which are considered government records — be retained so that they can later be found by congressional committees, historians and journalists.
The National Archives and Records Administration also required any emails sent or received from personal accounts during her time in office be preserved as part of the State Department’s records.
Clinton and her aides did not comply with this requirement.
“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business,” Jason R. Baron, director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration from 2000 to 2013, told the Times.
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, declined to say why she used a personal email address intend of a government one to do State Department business. Because she was sending emails to other State Department officials at their government email addresses, she had “every expectation they would be retained,” Merrill said, but declined to say what happened to correspondence with foreign leaders, people in the private sector or government employees outside of the State Department.
Current Secretary of State John Kerry has been using a government email address since taking over the role, and all of his correspondence is being recorded in State Department records, his aides said.
