2:48
- ABC News
- March 3, 2015
AC
She didn't use a "state.gov" account during her time at the State Department.
2:48
Clinton's team now has gone through her personal emails and forwarded any dealing with official business to the State Department for preservation, White House spokesman Josh Earnest reiterated during the daily White House news briefing today.
Earnest deferred numerous questions about the propriety of Clinton's private email use to State Department officials.
Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that the State Department \"has long had access to a wide array\" of Clinton's records, including emails to people using state.gov accounts as well as diplomatic cables, but she did not explicitly address emails that Clinton sent that involved non-governmental accounts.
Another spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said there was “no prohibition” on using personal email for government business as long as it was preserved. However, she could not say with confidence that Clinton provided the State Department with every relevant email from her personal account.
Harf said no classified business was conducted on Clinton’s email.
We don't know the extent of the security measures taken with her external account and whether they matched the measures taken by her colleagues who used government email accounts. Government accounts have their messages encrypted, for instance.
Harf could not say Clinton’s emails were secure. Asked how the department could guarantee their security, she said, “I don’t know, you’d have to ask her [Clinton].”
According to Merrill, Clinton's spokesman, no. He said that \"secretaries of state before her\" also used their own email accounts while \"engaging with department officials.\" That response, however, did not specify whether those secretaries of state used both government and private email accounts or just private email accounts like Clinton did, and it didn't specify whether those secretaries of state were operating under earlier sets of rules governing government employees' email conduct.
Without naming names, a senior state department official reiterated Merrill's claims that Clinton's predecessors practiced a similar private email policy.
\"It is our understanding that secretaries prior to Secretary Kerry didn't regularly use an official State Department account,\" the senior state department official told ABC News.
However, two prior secretaries of state either exclusively used government email or used no email at all, and a third avoided private email for classified matters, sources close to them told ABC News.
An official close to Condoleezza Rice, who led the State Department for three years preceding Clinton under George W. Bush, said Rice never used a personal email account for State Department business.
Peggy Cifrino, a spokesman for Colin Powell, the prior secretary of state, said the emails he did send from a personal account were mostly unclassified in nature and that his office has pledged to hand over any required emails in keeping with new policies designed to track electronic communications from senior government officials.
A former State Department official close to Madeline Albright, who preceded Powell as secretary of state in the late '90s, said she didn't use email at all.
The New York Times reported that Clinton's use of a personal account was first discovered during a House committee's investigation into the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. However, the State Department apparently just handed over a selection of about 300 emails to the committee two weeks ago.
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi Select Committee, issued a statement this morning saying that it has been known \"for several years that Secretary Clinton used her personal email account, apparently following the pattern of previous secretaries of state.\"
On top of that, anyone who received an email from her after she took over the State Department in 2009 would have recognized at the time that they were receiving an email from a non-state.gov address.
To quote another famous female politician, you betcha. Though Clinton has not yet announced her candidacy, her likely opponent, Jeb Bush, has already slammed her secretive move, saying that it lacked transparency.
Transparency matters. Unclassified @HillaryClinton emails should be released. You can see mine, here. http://t.co/wZbtwd8O2j
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) March 3, 2015
ABC News' Liz Kreutz and Jon Karl contributed to this report.
Get real-time updates as this story unfolds. To start, just \"star\" this story in ABC News' phone app. Download ABC News for iPhone here or ABC News for Android here. To be notified about our live weekend digital reports, tap here.
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