Hillary Clinton operated the email account she used for official State Department business from a server registered to her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.
The Web domain clintonemail.com, which appears to have hosted her email, was registered to someone named Eric Hoteham using the address of her New York house. The AP reported that the name does not appear in public records databases.
Hosting the emails on her own server, instead of with a provider like Google or Yahoo, may have given Clinton additional legal control over her emails. But it also may have made her communications less secure, because those large companies have more resources to protect their servers from attacks.
The email account was configured to start backing up to a Google server in 2012, the AP reported, after Clinton had said that China had tried to hack the Google email accounts of government employees. The email server was later connected to a commercial email provider run by security firm McAfee.
Hoteham is also associated with an email server at presidentclinton.com and the domain wjcoffice.com, perhaps an allusion to President Clinton’s initials, the AP reported.
The New York Times reported this week that Clinton exclusively used a private email address — later revealed to be hrc22@clintonemail.com — while at the State Department. Her aides only recently handed over some of those emails to the department, which collects employees’ emails to comply with public records laws.
Clinton did not comment on the growing controversy during a speech on Tuesday night, and the White House has declined to say whether it believes that Clinton broke transparency, as some have alleged.