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Aides to Hillary Clinton and the State Department are defending her use of a personal email address while secretary of state, while others are raising questions about whether her actions diverged from the habits of her predecessors and whether she complied with laws governing federal record keeping.

CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan has been in contact with a Clinton aide who said, "Nothing nefarious was at play. She had a Blackberry, she used it prior to State, and like her predecessors she continued to use it when she got to State. This was not bucking the system; this was in keeping with exactly what former Secretaries had done."

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Clinton's spokesman says the former secretary of state did nothing wrong using her private email to do official government business. That practic...

Clinton, according to her spokesman, Nick Merrill, "used her own email account when engaging with any Department officials. For government business, she emailed them on their Department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained."

One of her predecessors, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, appears to have used his personal email in much the same way. He wrote in his book, "It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership:"

"To complement the official State Department computer in my office, I installed a laptop computer on a private line. My personal email account on the laptop allowed me direct access to anyone online. I started shooting emails to my principal assistants, to individual ambassadors, and increasingly to my foreign-minister colleagues who like me were trying to bring their ministries into the 186,000-miles-per-second world."

Indeed, John Kerry is, according to the State Department, the first secretary of state whose primary account is a state.gov email address.

Last year, the State Department asked former Secretaries for help in retaining their email records. Clinton turned over 55,000 pages of emails, "anything pertaining to her work there," a Clinton aide told Brennan. "So if she emailed with her daughter about flower arrangements for her wedding, that didn't go in, but if she emailed one of the 100 State Department officials she regularly corresponded with, State had it in their servers already, and HRC's office replicated that to ensure it was all there. 9 out of 10 emails that she sent over the course of her tenure went to the State Department."

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Hillary Clinton's team defends her email usage during her tenure at State