Newly revealed internal State Department documents from 2011 show that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office specifically told employees not to use personal email accounts due to security reasons, but at the same time, Clinton still chose to conduct all government business on a private account hosted from her home.
The unclassified document obtained by Fox News was sent to diplomatic and consular staff in June 2011, and even bears Clinton's electronic signature.
It specified that employees were expected to "avoid conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts," also stating that employees should not "auto-forward Department email to personal email accounts which is prohibited by Department policy."
The cable was meant to warn of, among other security threats, "online adversaries" who had attempted to hack into the private email accounts of its employees, according to Fox News. It emphasized that personal accounts should never be used for government business and listed the department procedures that prohibit the practice.
This policy dates back to at least 2005, according to Politico.
Since it was revealed that Clinton violated official policy by conducting federal business with her personal email account hosted from her Chappaqua, New York home, the potential Democratic 2016 presidential candidate decided to turn over 55,000 pages of emails to the department for examination, which could take months, according to officials.
But according to The Washington Post, those 55,000 emails are only the ones that Clinton approved for release, meaning they are unlikely to contain emails of an inappropriate or embarrassing nature, since Clinton would not want to implicate herself. Because they were hosted on her private server, Clinton essentially gets to decide which emails become part of the federal record.
Depending on how secure Clinton's home and private server was, some have questioned whether she could be charged with improper storage of classified information. Just this week, former CIA Director David Petraeus pleaded guilty to such a charge, though he stored the classified information in several black notebooks in an unlocked drawer.
