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Hillary Rodham Clintons use of personal email accounts as secretary of State mimicked her predecessors but drew attention to her penchant for secrecy as she begins what appears to be a second presidential run.

Clinton turned her personal email over to the State Department last year so it could be saved for history, following both the letter and the spirit of the rules, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the presumptive Democratic candidate, said in a statement Tuesday.

Yet many of her emails became part of the record only when Clinton messaged State Department employees at their official addresses, he said, a practice that stops short of ensuring that every email Clinton wrote made its way into federal archives. The explanation left out what happened to her emails to foreign officials or others outside the government and what security concerns were raised by her use of a private email account.

Clintons allies defended the practice, with one liberal group labeling questions about it a right-wing attack. Merrill cited former secretaries of State of both parties who did the same thing.

Like secretaries of State before her, she used her own email account when engaging with any department officials, Merrill said. For government business, she emailed them on their department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained.

The Clinton camps response recalled earlier instances of her political instinct for privacy and protection, honed over years in public life. As first lady in the early 1990s, for example, the secrecy surrounding the closed-door healthcare reform negotiations that she spearheaded for President Clinton helped contribute to their failure.

Now, with Clinton widely considered the front-runner for her partys presidential nomination even though she has yet to declare her candidacy, her team is facing questions about her high-profile role as the nations top diplomat during President Obamas first term.

If the secretary was doing what she was supposed to do under the law, why would the State Department have to ask her for her emails back? asked Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the chairman of a House select committee looking into the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that happened while Clinton ran the department. Four Americans were killed, including the ambassador.

Word of Clintons private email account, first disclosed by the New York Times, put pressure on the White House to answer questions about an administration that Obama long has promised would be the most transparent in history. His team is supposed to conduct business on government email, yet some officials apparently exchanged messages with Clinton at one or more private email addresses when she was secretary of State.

The top White House spokesman said he wasnt sure whether anyone in the West Wing suspected Clinton wasnt using an official email address like everyone else.

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Hillary Clinton's use of private email not unusual, but still raises questions