Hillary Clinton asks for her personal emails to be released
For nearly two years after Hillary Clinton stepped down from her secretary of state post, the state department was unable to search her emails because they were in her possession, and not on the departments servers, officials said. Photograph: The New York Times
Hillary Clinton said late on Wednesday that she had asked the state department to release tens of thousands of work-related emails that she sent from her personal email account when she was secretary of state.
I want the public to see my email, Ms Clinton wrote in a post on Twitter. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.
Instead of releasing the emails - which total 50,000 pages - on her own, Ms Clinton asked the state department to do so, so that it can review them to determine whether parts should be redacted because they contain information that could be damaging to national security. That could take several weeks.
In a statement, the state department said it will review for public release the emails provided by Secretary Clinton to the department, using a normal process that guides such releases.
We will undertake this review as quickly as possible; given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete, the statement read.
The announcement came two days after the New York Times reported that Clinton did not have a government email address when she was secretary of state and that she had exclusively used a personal one to conduct her government business.
The report raised questions about whether Ms Clinton, who was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, violated National Archives and Records Administration regulations that said agencies must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.
The emails from Ms Clintons account were kept on private servers, shielding them from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests for at least 18 months after she left office, if not longer. It was only after the State Department asked Ms Clinton in October for emails on her personal account related to her work in office that she turned them over.
Three weeks ago, roughly 900 of the emails were turned over to a House committee investigating the 2012 attacks on US outposts in Benghazi.
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Hillary Clinton asks for her personal emails to be released