Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today conceded that it "would've been better" to conduct official correspondence on a government email address rather than a personal one, but argued that her use of that personal account was "allowed."
When she started work at the State Department, "I opted to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry one device for my work and personal emails instead of two," Clinton said during a press conference at the United Nations today.
The move was for "convenience," she continued, though she said it probably would have been "smarter" to just carry two devices.
The "vast majority" of work-related emails were sent to government employees, she said, so those messages were saved on State Department servers automatically. All other work-related messages have since been turned over to federal authorities.
Clinton's use of a personal email for official correspondence came to light last week in a New York Times article that said she "exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, [which] may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record."
In a press briefing the next day, however, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf said there is "no prohibition on using a non-State.gov account for official business as long as it's preserved."
As the Times noted, Clinton's use of a personal account was found by a House committee investigating the Benghazi attack. The panel asked for correspondence between Clinton and her aides, and the State Department gave the committee about 300 messages.
The State Department got those messages from Clinton because it was "in the process of updating our records management [and] reached out to all of the former secretaries of state to ask them to provide any records they had," Harf said last week.
"Secretary Clinton sent back 55,000 pages of documents to the State Department very shortly after we sent the letter to her," Harf said. "She was the only former Secretary of State who sent documents back in to this request."
As Politifact.com noted, it's really only reasonable to assume that four former secretaries of state might have used email during their tenure: Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Madeleine Albright. Rice and Albright have said they did not use email for official businesses while serving, and Powell said he did not preserve his correspondence.
Of note is that Clinton had an email server in her home to handle correspondence. She said today that that was set up for former President Bill Clinton, and was guarded by Secret Service. "There were no security breaches," she said.
Clinton said today that she went through her personal email and weeded out any messages that might be work-related. Non-work emails covered things like her daughter's wedding, her mother's funeral arrangements, and more mundane daily correspondence. She won't retain or release those messages because "no one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that."
When asked if there's any conflict in having Clinton weed out personal from professional emails by herself, Clinton said that is basically what the government asks all its employees to do on a daily basis.
"Even if you have a work-related device with a work-related .gov account, you choose what goes on that," she said. "That is how our system works. We trust [the] judgment of thousands of people to make those decisions, and I feel I did that and even more."
The work emails that were provided to the State Department will eventually be released by the agency, Clinton said, which will provide "unprecedented insight" into a high government official's daily life.