The uproar over Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email account to conduct business during her tenure at the State Department has taken so many twists and turns this summer that it’s difficult to keep it all straight.
When it was first raised in March, the core issue with a government official’s use of a private email account appeared to be compliance with federal records laws. Mounting questions from the media eventually forced Clinton to address her private email use at a press conference and her campaign to release a nine-page explainer on her handling of the email account’s contents.
The issue appeared to lie dormant for the spring, but it came roaring back in the press by the end of July, when focus shifted to whether sensitive information was mishandled via the private account. Now, it’s not just pundits, but also fellow Democrats who openly wonder whether the email imbroglio will derail the party frontrunner’s presidential campaign.
Here’s a detailed guide tracing back the news reports, government inquiries and Clinton camp statements that marked each step in the months-long email saga. This timeline is an updated version of one TPM published in March.
August 26
Clinton said at an event in Iowa that setting up the private email server “clearly wasn’t the best choice,” conceding that all the questions swirling around her use of a private account were understandable.
August 19
NBC News reported that the FBI said it was confident it could retrieve information from the server despite what it said was an attempt to erase the contents.
Later that day at a Las Vegas town hall, Fox News’ Ed Henry asked Clinton directly whether she’d wiped the server clean.
“What, like with a cloth or something?” Clinton joked, adding “Well, no, I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”
August 11
Clinton’s attorney agreed to turn over the server, as well as a thumb drive that contained copies of the work emails she’d already turned over to the State Department, to the FBI.
August 4
Reports emerged that the FBI was looking into the security of the so-called “homebrew” email server Clinton had set up from her home in Chappaqua, New York. The inquiry involved contacting Platte River Networks, the Denver-based technology firm Clinton hired to manage the server.
The front entrance of Platte River Networks.
July 28
The Clinton campaign sent a sharply worded letter to The New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, that assailed the newspaper for its “questionable sourcing” and “erroneous” reporting about federal inquiries into the private email account.
“The New York Times is arguably the most important news outlet in the world and it rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page charging that a major candidate for President of the United States was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement,” Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri wrote to Baquet. “Literally hundreds of outlets followed your story, creating a firestorm that had a deep impact that cannot be unwound.”
July 27
The New York Times published a lengthy editor’s note that acknowledged it should have corrected errors in its reporting on a federal inquiry into Clinton’s private email account sooner.
Nevertheless, the newspaper laid the blame for its mistaken information at the feet of “multiple high-level government sources.”
July 24
The Justice Department said that it never received a criminal referral from the inspectors general of the State Department and intelligence agencies to investigate Clinton’s private email account. Instead, the agency said it received a request related to the potential compromise of classified information.
July 23
The New York Times reported that the two inspectors general asked the Justice Department to open a criminal probe into whether sensitive information was mishandled on Clinton’s private email account. The article later underwent revisions to clarify that Clinton herself was not a target of the purported criminal investigation, although no clarifications or corrections were appended to the piece until two days later — one totaling 64 words and another 58 words.
March 27
Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, wrote in a letter to the House Select Committee on Benghazi that “there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com emails from Secretary of State Clinton’s tenure on the server for any review, even if such a review were appropriate or legally authorized.”
It was unclear from Kendall’s letter when the emails were deleted, though he wrote that Clinton had requested the by then-defunct private email account be set to retain only the last 60 days of emails.
Clinton addresses her private email use in a March press conference at the United Nations.
March 11
The Associated Press filed suit against the State Department to force the release of Clinton’s emails, as well as other documents from her tenure at that the news service had requested under the Freedom of Information Act without a response from the agency.
March 10
Clinton held a news conference to answer questions about her email use at the United Nations, where she spoke earlier at a women’s empowerment event. She disclosed that she deleted a trove of emails related to her personal life and insisted that any work-related correspondence had been turned over to the State Department.
“I think that we have more than met the request from the State Department,” she said, in reference to the 30,000 work emails she said she turned over to the agency. “The server contains personal communications from my husband and me and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities. The server will remain private and I think that the State Department will be able over time to release all of the records that were provided.”
March 5
Clinton addressed the burgeoning email controversy for the first time in public via Twitter. She tweeted that she had asked the State Department to release all her correspondence to the public in the spirit of transparency.
March 4
The Associated Press reported that the former secretary’s clintonemail.com address traced back to a private email server at her Chappaqua, New York home. The AP found that the server was registered under a pseudonym.
The server computer that transmitted and received Clinton’s emails traced back to a residential Internet service registered at her family’s five-bedroom home in Chappaqua, New York.
March 2
The New York Times first reported that Clinton may have run afoul of federal regulations by exclusively using a personal email account to conduct business as secretary of state.
December 5, 2014
The Clinton camp said that at this time it provided the State Department with 30,490 work-related emails that totaled about 55,000 printed pages.
It also said Clinton deleted emails she deemed related to her personal life sometime afterward.
“After her work-related emails were identified and preserved, Secretary Clinton chose not to keep her private, personal emails that were not federal records,” the statement from her office read.
November 2014
The House Select Committee on Benghazi sent a letter to the State Department with a broader request for Clinton’s emails, according to her office. The agency said it provided the committee with just under 300 emails relating to Libya.
On Nov. 26, President Obama signed into law an updated version of the Federal Records Act. Under the updated law, officials were required to copy or forward any government-related correspondence on a private account to their official government email address, according to the Wall Street Journal.
October 28, 2014
The State Department sent a letter to the four secretaries of state that preceded John Kerry. Clinton’s office said that the agency sought any work-related emails sent or received at personal email accounts during the officials’ respective tenures.
August 2014
The State Department provided some of Clinton’s correspondence to the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Clinton’s office said that correspondence was already in the agency’s possession because Clinton had written to department officials who used government email accounts.
May 2014
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) announced the formation of a Republican-led select committee to investigate the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
September 2013
The National Archives and Records Administration issued new guidance on management of federal records, including instructions for using personal email accounts.
March 2013
Clinton’s private email address, hdr22@clintonemail.com, was revealed for the first time. The email address surfaced after Romanian hacker Guccifer broke into former White House adviser Sidney Blumenthal’s AOL email account and leaked screenshots of his inbox.
February 1, 2013
Clinton formally left the State Department.
September 11, 2012
Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
January 21, 2009
The U.S. Senate confirmed Clinton to head up the State Department.
January 13, 2009
The clintonemail.com domain was created, Internet records showed.
December 2008
President Barack Obama nominated Clinton as secretary of state.
