Hillary Clinton used iPad for email; mixed personal, work chats

Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Rodham Clinton emailed her staff on an iPad as well as a BlackBerry while Secretary of State, despite her explanation she exclusively used a personal email address on a homebrew server so that she could carry a single device, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press .

The State Department released a total of four emails between Ms. Clinton and her top advisers as part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2013 by the AP , which sought Ms. Clinton’s correspondence with senior advisers over a four-year period relating to drone strikes overseas and U.S. surveillance programs.

The messages came from and were sent to her private email address, hosted on a server at her property in Chappaqua, New York, as opposed to a government-run email account.

They show that Ms. Clinton, on at least one occasion, accidentally mingled personal and work matters. In reply to a message sent in September 2011 by adviser Huma Abedin to Ms. Clinton’s personal email account, which contained an

AP story about a drone strike in Pakistan, Ms. Clinton mistakenly replied with questions that appear to be about decorations.

The other emails between Ms. Clinton and her advisers provided by the State Department contained a summary of a 2011 meeting between Senator John McCain and senior Egyptian officials in Cairo. It was uncensored and did not appear to contain sensitive information. That email was forwarded to Ms. Clinton’s private account from Abedin’s government email address.

In another note, Ms. Clinton expressed apparent dismay at leaks of classified U.S. government information to the media. Referencing a

CNN story, which described “loose lips” in the Obama administration, she asked two officials if she should comment on the matter as had Leon Panetta, the former Central Intelligence Agency director.

“I think this is both dishonourable and dangerous and want to find way to say it,” she wrote.

Ms. Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said early on Tuesday that the secretary used her iPad from time to time, primarily to read news clippings.

At the United Nations earlier this month, Ms. Clinton said she chose a personal account over a government one out of convenience, describing it as a way to carry a single device, rather than one for work emails and another for personal messages.