Clinton used her own BlackBerry rather than a State Department device

The BlackBerry device Hillary Rodham Clinton used when she was secretary of state was not issued by the government, the State Department said, a detail that complicates Clinton’s explanation that she chose to rely on an unorthodox private e-mail address and server purely for convenience.

Clinton “was not issued a State Department BlackBerry,” department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. In 2009, when Clinton took office and set up the e-mail arrangement, government-issued BlackBerry devices could not be used to host commercial or other outside e-mail addresses. Clinton could have chosen a government device, which would have meant using a government address. Had she done that, her e-mails, both professional and personal, would have been more quickly accessible to congressional investigators, historians, journalists or others seeking information about her actions and communications as the nation’s top diplomat. But in choosing to make the single device she carried a personal one, Clinton made that material harder to obtain.