Using Private E-mail, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

In 2012, congressional investigators asked the State Department for a wide range of documents related to the attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The department eventually responded, furnishing House committees with thousands of documents. But it turns out that that was not everything. The State Department had not searched the e-mail account of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton because she had maintained a private account, which shielded it from such searches, department officials acknowledged.

Clinton’s aides sought to play down the significance of her exclusive use of a personal e-mail account for State Department business. But an examination of records requests sent to the department reveals how the practice protected a significant amount of her correspondence from the eyes of investigators and the public. Clinton’s exclusive use of personal e-mail for her government business is unusual for a high-level official, archive experts have said. Federal regulations, since 2009, have required that all e-mails be preserved as part of an agency’s record-keeping system. In Clinton’s case, her e-mails were kept on her personal account and her staff took no steps to have them preserved as part of State Department record.