Hillary Clinton had the right to delete emails she deemed personal without first getting official permission, the Department of Justice said in a court filing this week.

The DOJ's assertion backs up Clinton's claims that government rules allowed her to deem on her own which emails were personal — and to delete them if she decided they were.

"There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server," attorneys from the Justice Department's civil division wrote.

The Justice Department was responding to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is seeking access to Clinton's emails. The group had requested a court order to ensure that Clinton's emails were being preserved.

As she seeks the Democratic nomination for president, Clinton has been forced to grapple with a mounting controversy over how she used a personal email address for official business as secretary of state. Of the roughly 60,000 emails Clinton says she sent and received during that time, she says she deleted about half of them because they were personal.

The Justice Department said that under federal record-keeping guidelines, government employees are "required to review each message, identify its value and either delete it or move it to a record-keeping system."

"Under policies issue both by the National Archives and Records Administration and the State Department, individual officers and employees are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record," the agency wrote in its court filing, which was made on Wednesday.