Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exclusively used a non-official e-mail ID in the conduct of confidential government business, according to the U.S State Department, and she “may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.”
Ms. Clinton’s use of the e-mail address “hdr22@clintonemail.com”, believed to have been hosted on a server registered to her New York home, became known after a House of Representatives committee looking into the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya demanded the correspondence in her office regarding the attack.
Reports noted that throughout her four-year stint as Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton eschewed a government e-mail address and her staff “took no action to have her personal e-mails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.”
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However a few months ago, when the State Department began to tighten the screws on compliance with federal record-keeping guidelines, Ms. Clinton’s aides had to turn in approximately 55,000 pages of e-mails.
This week Ms. Clinton, a potential Democratic candidate for the 2016 presidential race, broke her silence over the controversy and called upon State Department to release them swiftly to the public.
Also said to be responsible for lifting the veil of secrecy on Ms. Clinton’s use of a private e-mail address was Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel, nicknamed “Guccifer,” who is currently serving out a seven-year jail term for his online attacks against scores of public figures, including the family of former U.S. President George Bush.
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