Hillary Clinton’s Use of Personal E-mail

[Commentary] Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decision when she was secretary of state to use only her personal e-mail account to conduct official business was a disturbing departure from the normal practice of relying primarily on departmental e-mails for official business.

The State Department says there was no prohibition at the time, and there is still no prohibition, against using private e-mail accounts to conduct official business, provided the communications are preserved as departmental records. But as Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times, Clinton’s aides took no action to have her personal e-mails preserved on departmental servers. Only after the State Department, in the process of updating its record-keeping rules, asked former secretaries of state to provide emails that they had sent from private accounts conducting official business did Clinton provide some 55,000 pages of e-mails. The State Department says that a vast majority of Clinton’s e-mails were sent to or received from departmental officials and were already preserved in the system. But correspondence sent to foreign leaders or people in the private sector may not have been preserved.

At this point, it is not clear what damage, if any, might have resulted from her decision to use personal e-mail for all of her official business. But it was potentially a barrier to congressional oversight committees, reporters and historians seeking a complete record.