Hillary Rodham Clinton used a private email account for her official government business when she was secretary of state and did not routinely preserve and turn over those emails for government records collection, the State Department said on Monday.
Clinton has turned over thousands of emails to the department from her private account, a step that was first reported by the New York Times late on Monday. The private account came to light when the department sought records from Clinton and other former secretaries who have held the post during the email age.
Some 300 of Clinton’s recovered emails were then turned over to a congressional committee investigating the 2012 deaths of four Americans at U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
“Last year, the Department sent a letter to representatives of former secretaries of state requesting they submit any records in their possession for proper preservation,” Psaki said in a statement. “In response to our request, Secretary Clinton provided the Department with emails spanning her time at the Department. After the State Department reviewed those emails, we produced about 300 emails responsive to recent requests from the Select Committee.”
A spokesman for Clinton did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday night. The spokesman, Nick Merrill, told the Times that Clinton has complied with the “letter and the spirit” of federal rules on the retention of official documents.
It was not clear why Clinton, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, created the private account. But the practice appears to bolster long-standing criticism that Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, have not been transparent.
“Hillary Clinton should release her emails,” said Kristy Campbell, a spokeswoman for former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is also weighing a presidential bid. “Hopefully, she hasn’t already destroyed them.”
Campbell noted that Bush created a website, www.jebemails.com, providing public access to his electronic communications while in office. “Governor Bush believes transparency is a critical part of public service and of governing,” she said in a statement.
Clinton’s aides reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department, the Times reported. In total, 55,000 pages of emails were turned over, the newspaper reported.
Clinton was not the first secretary of state to use a private account. The State Department said Clinton’s successor as top diplomat, John Kerry, is the first secretary to use a standard government email address ending in “state.gov.”
Psaki played down the effect of Clinton’s use of a private account.
“The State Department has long had access to a wide array of Secretary Clinton’s records – including emails between her and Department officials with state.gov accounts, as well as cables,” Psaki said in the statement.
Clinton never had such an address and relied exclusively on the private account, the Times reported. The Times said Clinton’s aides took no action during her four years as secretary to ensure that the records would be preserved on department servers, as required by the Federal Records Act.
It is not clear whether Clinton retained copies of all the emails from her four years at the department.
“The department is in the process of updating our records preservation policies to bring them in line with recent 2013 National Archives and Records Administration guidance,” Psaki said. “These steps include regularly archiving all of Secretary Kerry’s emails to ensure that we are capturing all federal records.”
Washington Post staff writer Ed O’Keefe contributed to this report.
