The former secretary of state and likely 2016 candidate’s supporters have rallied to her defense, but the revelations leave Clinton vulnerable to serious criticism

Within hours of the news that Hillary Clinton had used her personal email account to conduct government business while serving as US secretary of state, her extensive network of supporters launched a damage-limitation exercise.



“Correct the Record”, a rapid rebuttal unit set up by the Super Pac American Bridge to protect Clinton and other prominent Democratic candidates from rightwing attacks in the 2016 election cycle, put out a statement that sought to dilute the revelation. Clinton had voluntarily handed over 55,000 pages of her emails, the statement said, and had “followed State Department precedent with regard to the use of email”.

But the impact of the revelation may prove harder to rebut than that. It leaves Clinton vulnerable to at least three lines of criticism: that she potentially broke fundamental rules governing the handling and security of state secrets; that she skirted around guidelines put in place to ensure historical accountability and transparency within high public office; and the political attack that she must have had something to hide.

Potentially breaching rules relating to state secrets

Perhaps the most serious accusation facing Clinton is that she may have breached one of the fundamental tenets of classified information. J William Leonard, former director of the body that keeps watch over executive branch secrets, the Information Security Oversight Office, told the Guardian that if Clinton had dealt with confidential government matters through her personal email, that would have been problematic. “There is no such thing as personal copies of classified information. All classified information belongs to the US government and it should never leave the control of the government.”



There are also questions around the security of Clinton’s private email at a time of heightened concern about cyber-attacks. Much is not known about the configuration of her email account and how it interacted with secure State Department systems, and nor is it known whether her emails were routinely encrypted.

Jeff Moss, one of America’s most celebrated hackers, who is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative, said that it was also unclear whether Clinton’s private email was connected to other servers. “With a lot of mobile devices and remote back-up systems you don’t know where the data ends up – it could be in the cloud, or in Google or other servers. That can create a nightmare in terms of security, though in this case we still don’t know enough.”

According to news reports, Clinton used the domain address @clintonemail.com for her private email. Simple tests conducted by cyber experts suggest that the domain may have been vulnerable.

Jonathan Mayer, a graduate fellow at Stanford University, carried out a basic test on email exchanges to and from the domain and found that though the server supported encryption it did not properly authenticate the information. That weakness could theoretically allow a hacker to receive the email by spoofing the server.

Preserving the historical record

Then there is the charge that by using her private email for all her business, including government affairs, Clinton may have violated established rules set out in the Federal Records Act. Under federal law, correspondence including emails to and from government officials must be preserved for history and to ensure openness in government.

Clinton’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, told the New York Times, the paper that broke the story, that she had stuck to “both the letter and spirit of the rules”. He said it was accepted that officials could use their non-government emails “as long as appropriate records were preserved”.

But it is not clear whether Clinton has handed over all relevant emails. She transferred 55,000 pages of them to the State Department following a formal request for them earlier this year, but it has not been disclosed how many pages were withheld following a review of the material by her advisers.

Ryan Shapiro, a freedom of information expert at MIT, said that that raised issues of transparency. “Given her presidential ambitions, Secretary Clinton’s open contempt for transparency is deeply troubling,” he said.

Political damage

The most toxic fallout from the disclosure may turn out to be the political ammunition that it has handed Clinton’s enemies in the Republican party ahead of her likely 2016 presidential run. Any suggestion that she might have held back emails as a means of massaging her record as America’s top diplomat could be seized on by Republican leaders as part of their negative campaigning.

The Republican National Committee was quick to put out a statement saying: “It all begs the question: what was Hillary Clinton trying to hide?”

The disclosure over the email could also play into the long-running party political dispute over Benghazi, the 2012 attack in Libya in which the the US ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans died. The New York Times reported that the State Department last month handed over about 300 emails from the stash handed over by Clinton to the congressional committee investigating Benghazi.

The discovery by the same committee of Clinton’s personal email use could further inflame the controversy.