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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 used personal email while serving as secretary of State

Hillary Clinton on Monday helped unveil a new report on global gender inequality co-sponsored by her family's foundation, but did not address recent revelations that the Clinton Foundation accepted donations from foreign governments that have been oppressive to women.

She also did not address the fact the foundation accepted funds from foreign governments when she was secretary of state. Or why she used a private email address during that time.

The report and its rollout were meant to help showcase the women's rights speech Clinton delivered in Beijing in 1995, one of the highlights of her time as first lady. But the controversies have overshadowed her attempts to tout her work on behalf of women in the run-up to her likely presidential campaign.

Clinton has so far remained relatively mum, only tweeting last week that she has asked the State Department to release her emails.

Some Democrats, sush as California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, have called on Clinton to explain why she used a private email account while serving as America's top diplomat.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Monday said President Barack Obama emailed with Clinton on occasion but did not know it was a personal email server.

"He was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act," Earnest said.

Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, addressed the fundraising controversy on Saturday. "My theory about all of this is disclose everything and then let people make their judgments," he said in an interview at the Clinton Global Initiative University.

"You've got to decide when you do this work whether it will do more good than harm if someone helps you from another country," he added.

The report, titled "No Ceiling," found that women around the world have made tremendous gains over the past two decades in closing the gender gap. But in many areas, including leadership, women's progress has been too slow.

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Hillary Clinton Remains Mum on Controversies

Lawmakers began investigating Hillary Rodham Clintons use of personal email while she was secretary of State after the disclosure Wednesday that she had exclusive control over her email account through a private server linked to her New York home.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which has been investigating the fatal 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya, said it issued subpoenas for Clintons personal emails related to the attack, and for those of others who also might have information. The panel sent letters to Internet firms telling them to preserve emails.

Meanwhile, Internet records confirmed Clinton had her own server installed to use the clintonemail.com account, which was set up in January 2009, when she began serving as top U.S. diplomat. Use of the server was first reported by the Associated Press.

While her private email use appeared to break no law, it violated administration policy calling for officials to use government email accounts. Legal experts and public-disclosure advocates contend her use of the account could limit public access to her records.

Critics say it raises questions about Clintons penchant for secrecy during her public career, and could complicate her expected run for the presidency.

Clinton turned over some of her messages at the State Departments request last year. Late Wednesday, she said on Twitter: "I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible."

The Benghazi committee has been pressing Clinton for more details of how she and other State Department officials responded to the attack. The new revelations could extend the committee's investigation and escalate its conflict with Clinton.

A spokesman for the committee, Jamal D. Ware, said the panel had discovered Clinton used two separate email addresses while she was secretary of State.

Without access to the relevant electronic information and stored data on the server which was reportedly registered to her home there is no way the committee, or anyone else, can fully explain why the committee uncovered two email addresses, the statement said.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the committee, told reporters the panel would use whatever legal recourse we have to get the documents.

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Lawmakers subpoena Hillary Clinton's private emails on Benghazi attack

WASHINGTON The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Clinton's emails -- on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state -- traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton's secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications. Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work.

In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands.

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account -- hdr22(at)clintonemail.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym -- for official State Department business.

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

But homebrew email servers are generally not as reliable, secure from hackers or protected from fires or floods as those in commercial data centers. Those professional facilities provide monitoring for viruses or hacking attempts, regulated temperatures, off-site backups, generators in case of power outages, fire-suppression systems and redundant communications lines.

A spokesman for Clinton did not respond to requests seeking comment from the AP on Tuesday. Clinton ignored the issue during a speech Tuesday night at the 30th anniversary gala of EMILY's List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights.

It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton's $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010.

The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton's email server. The former president's full name is William Jefferson Clinton.

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Hillary Clinton's computer server traced to family's New York home - FOX NEWS FIRST: No entitlement reform: Hillary ...

Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency's records.

But Mrs. Clinton and her aides failed to do so.

How many emails were in Mrs. Clinton's account is not clear, and neither is the process her advisers used to determine which ones related to her work at the State Department before turning them over.

"It's a shame it didn't take place automatically when she was secretary of state as it should have," said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a group based at George Washington University that advocates government transparency. "Someone in the State Department deserves credit for taking the initiative to ask for the records back. Most of the time it takes the threat of litigation and embarrassment."

Mr. Blanton said high-level officials should operate as President Obama does, emailing from a secure government account, with every record preserved for historical purposes.

"Personal emails are not secure," he said. "Senior officials should not be using them."

Penalties for not complying with federal record-keeping requirements are rare, because the National Archives has few enforcement abilities.

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, declined to detail why she had chosen to conduct State Department business from her personal account. He said that because Mrs. Clinton had been sending emails to other State Department officials at their government accounts, she had "every expectation they would be retained." He did not address emails that Mrs. Clinton may have sent to foreign leaders, people in the private sector or government officials outside the State Department.

The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.

And others who, like Mrs. Clinton, are eyeing a candidacy for the White House are stressing a very different approach. Jeb Bush, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, released a trove of emails in December from his eight years as governor of Florida.

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Did Hillary Clinton break rules over email use?