While at the State Department, Hillary Clinton only used her personal email account

(Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

last updated 3 March 2015

During her four years as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton used her personal email account exclusively and did not have a government email address, The New York Times reports.

This may have violated the Federal Records Act, which requires that personal emails be preserved on department servers; letters and email written by federal officials are supposed to be retained and filed so congressional committees, media outlets, and historians can easily find them, with some exceptions for classified and sensitive material. To comply with new federal record-keeping practices, Clinton's advisers gave 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department two months ago, and a spokesman said she is adhering to the "letter and spirit of the rules."

Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle and Reath and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, said there really wasn't a reason why Clinton should have been using just her personal email address throughout her tenure. "It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level-head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business," he said.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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