Hillary Clinton may have violated federal regulations by exclusively using her personal email address to conduct business at the State Department, the New York Times reported Monday.
In context, Clinton isn’t the only government official or secretary of state to conduct some official business on a personal email account. But Clinton didn’t have a government email address at all during her tenure as secretary of state and her aides didn’t take steps to preserve her correspondence on government servers, according to the report.
At the time of Clinton’s tenure, the National Archives and Records Administration required that email correspondence from personal accounts be preserved in the agency’s records, according to the Times.
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told the Times that Clinton’s use of her personal email account complied with the “letter and spirit of the rules.” He added that Clinton had “every expectation” her correspondence would be retained because she had written to the government email addresses of other State Department officials.
Clinton advisers reviewed her personal emails two months ago in response to a State Department request for her records and turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the agency, according to the report.
Merrill, the Clinton spokesman, later released a lengthy statement on the former secretary of state’s use of her personal email. Read the full statement below via USA Today:
Like Secretaries of State before her, she used her own email account when engaging with any Department officials. For government business, she emailed them on their Department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained. When the Department asked former Secretaries last year for help ensuring their emails were in fact retained, we immediately said yes.
Both the letter and spirit of the rules permitted State Department officials to use non-government email, as long as appropriate records were preserved. As a result of State’s request for our help to make sure they in fact were, that is what happened here. As the Department stated, it is in the process of updating its record preservation policies to bring them in line with its retention responsibilities.
This post has been updated.
Good grief how stupid can you be. It is almost as if the Clintons cannot help themselves when it comes to creating drama, scandal and mis-steps. The Right is going to have a field day with this one and Benghazzi will once again be front and center.
There has be another Democrat that can run in 2016
It doesn’t take much to remind me of why I was so happy to vote for Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries.
Yawn…
This was very dumb if nothing else. Most likely she did it out of convince like many do but the wild speculation about coverups, and conspiracies has already begun
Yet more Clinton hatred from the Screw York Times.