Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never sent any classified emails through her personal email account during the multiple years that she was in office, the State Department said on Tuesday.
“We have no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal email account for anything but unclassified purposes,” department spokeswoman Marie Harf said during the department’s daily briefing.
{mosads}Clinton’s habit of using her personal email account for official business instead of an official department email account caused a firestorm Tuesday after it was revealed in a New York Times story.
In addition to concerns about erasing history, critics have worried that the use of a private email account might make the messages vulnerable to hackers, since it is not clear whether Clinton employed any type of encryption or digital protection of her messages.
But Harf said Tuesday that if she had to send those sensitive messages, Clinton used secure phone calls, went through aides or took other steps to make sure they were protected.
“She certainly had a way of communicating in a classified setting,” she said.
Republicans have leaped at the chance to criticize Clinton, who they say may have violated the Federal Records Act by using her personal account throughout her entire four years in charge of the State Department.
“Violations of the Federal Records Act within federal agencies is something we take very seriously,” House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said in a statement referring to the news about Clinton, without explicitly accusing her of violating the law.
Harf denied that any wrongdoing had taken place.
“There was no prohibition on using a non-State.gov account for official business as long as it was preserved,” she said.
Most of the emails the former secretary sent from her private account went to State Department officials, she claimed, so the messages were preserved that way. Others were part of a trove of 55,000 pages of messages delivered to the department in recent months, as part of an update of its recordkeeping policies.