The revelation that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a personal email account while serving as secretary of state has caused a furor. But while Clinton’s use of HDR22@clintonemail.com, as revealed by the New York Times on Monday, was controversial, it may not have violated any federal regulations about preserving records.



The issue is not necessarily that she used a personal email account – while the current secretary of state, John Kerry, uses a government email, former secretary Colin Powell used a personal email address during his tenure – but that the government was not able to preserve that correspondence. At the time Clinton was at the State Department, there was no explicit requirement for senior government officials to preserve emails. Guidance making clear that email records needed to be preserved was not issued until after Clinton left office in 2013 and not codified into law until 2014.

In a statement, a senior State Department official told the Guardian that a request was issued to Clinton and other past secretaries of state in October, in compliance with the new law, and that she turned over emails in December.

Concerns have been raised, though, by the fact that the State Department did not possess any of these records until recently. In a response to a freedom of information request issued by Gawker in 2013, the State Department said it did not have any emails from Clinton’s personal address which were sent to Clinton insider Sidney Blumenthal – emails which had been leaked separately by the hacker Guccifer.

Former Clinton staffers told Business Insider that the reason Clinton used a personal email address was that State Department policy at the time was not to allow multiple email addresses to be used on the same BlackBerry. The result, they claimed, was Clinton used a single email address for both personal and governmental matters to increase efficiency.

But at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the House select committee on Benghazi, claimed Clinton used multiple personal email accounts, not just HDR22@clintonemail.com. The Republican congressman added that he did not know what percentage of the relevant emails had been turned over by Clinton to the State Department and that this failure would necessitate the former secretary of state appearing multiple times before his committee.

Although Clinton’s use of a personal email account for work has raised concerns about security, the deputy State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said in a statement: “We have no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal email account for anything but unclassified purposes.”

Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, offered a vigorous defense. “Like secretaries of state before her, she used her own email account when engaging with any department officials,” he said.

“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.”

Merrill went on to note 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”.