Clinton defends use of personal e-mail at State

William Cummings | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Clinton used personal e-mail for official business The extent to which Hillary Clinton used her personal e-mail account for official State Department business is coming under scrutiny following a new report that suggests she violated federal regulations.

Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of a personal e-mail account to conduct government business during her four-year tenure as secretary of State may have violated federal regulations, The New York Times reported Monday night.

Only official accounts are automatically preserved for public record. The Times said Clinton's aides "took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act."

In December Clinton turned over 55,000 pages of personal e-mails to the State Department, but only after Clinton's aides reviewed them and selected which pages to hand over, the Times reported.

Clinton's spokesman Nick Merrill issued a statement saying that "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.

The statement added that "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."

E-mails from Clinton's personal account sent to people not using government accounts, which would include foreign officials, would not have been automatically kept.

White House: Clinton followed e-mail policy White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed the e-mail archiving policy outlined by President Obama.

Some Republicans were quick to criticize Clinton, who is considered the favorite to win the Democratic nomination should she choose to become a 2016 presidential candidate.

Jeb Bush, a likely contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, tweeted, "Transparency matters. Unclassified @HillaryClinton emails should be released. You can see mine, here. http://jebbushemails.com," in response to the story.

"This latest development raises serious questions," Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short said in a press release. "And it all begs the question: what was Hillary Clinton trying to hide?"

The Times reports that Clinton's exclusive use of a personal e-mail account would have violated the rules and regulations established by the National Archive and Records Administration at the time, but according to The Wall Street Journal the matter is not so clear.

"It is unclear whether Mrs. Clinton's practice ran afoul of federal laws and regulations governing the retention of official records," the Journal says.

The laws and regulations regarding the handling of electronic communications among federal agencies has undergone several changes in recent years, including an amendment to the Federal Records Act that President Obama signed into law in November, 2014. The bill requires that e-mails dealing with official matters that are sent from a personal account must be forwarded to an official account within 20 days.

A September 2013 bulletin from NARA suggests federal employees "should not generally use personal email accounts to conduct official agency business." The bulletin suggests exceptions could be "emergency situations" or on occasions where the employee is contacted through their personal e-mail account.

Both the Federal Records Act amendment and NARA bulletin took effect after Clinton left the State Department in February, 2013.

Clinton's e-mails from her tenure as secretary of State have been of particular interest to the House select committee that has been investigating the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi that left four Americans dead. Two weeks ago the State Department handed about 300 of Clinton's e-mails to the Benghazi committee, the Times reports.

Contributing: John Bacon