Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not only used a private email account to conduct all federal business, but her staff also used unsecured personal email accounts when corresponding with her about the attack in Benghazi, the New York Times reported Monday.
Some of Clinton's 300 emails that she turned over to a House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi terror attack revealed that Clinton and her aides closely monitored the fallout from the Benghazi attack, exchanging messages on private accounts completely outside the secure State Department email network, The New York Times reported.
Earlier this month during a news conference held by Clinton to explain her email flub, the nation's former top diplomat told reporters that the "vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.... to meet record keeping requirements, and that, indeed, is what happened," Politico reported.
But the discovery of her secret email network casts doubts on how truthful Clinton was being, throwing an even larger wrench into her likely 2016 presidential bid. Transparency and security advocates question whether Clinton violated government openness and record-keeping laws, and many suggest that she even jeopardized national security by conducting federal business on unsecured networks that were more vulnerable to hacks.
During her tenure at the State Department, Clinton conducted all federal business from a private email account connected to a private server hosted from her home. Her email domain was hosted with a "consumer-grade" registrar that had been hacked in 2010.
Those 300 emails reported on by the Times only represent 1 percent of the 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department in 2014 upon the insistence of Republican investigators. Without any oversight from a neutral third party, Clinton and her team deleted an additional 30,000 emails from her private account that she described as personal in nature.
On Friday, the committee investigating Benghazi formally asked that Clinton turn over her private email server so that an independent third party can examine the contents to see whether she complied with federal laws, reported The Hill.
