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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

The New York Timesis reporting that, during the time that she served as secretary of State,Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private e-mail account with unknown security protocolsto communicate with State Department employees, others in the federal government and, presumably, foreign government officials, in what appears to be a violation of both the letter and the spirit of federal record keeping laws:

WASHINGTON Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials correspondence be retained as part of the agencys record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clintons advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretarys post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario short of nuclear winter where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business, said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the letter and spirit of the rules.

Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official or first secretary of state to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work, appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an agencys computer server is not working.

I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business, said Mr. Baron, who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.

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Report: Hillary Clinton evaded government e-mail while secretary of State

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Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers keynote address during Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women on February 24, 2015 in Santa Clara, California Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she did not have a government email address and used only a personal email account for government correspondence, according to a report by the New York Times.

Citing State Department officials, the Times reported that Clinton, who used her personal account for the entire four years she was secretary, "may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record."

Deputy State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf defended Clinton in a statement issued Monday evening, saying, "The State Department has long had access to a wide array of Secretary Clinton's records -- including emails between her and Department officials with state.gov accounts."

Last year, the State Department contacted former secretaries of state, including Clinton, to request that they submit "any records in their possession for proper preservation" in accordance with new guidelines from the National Archives and Records Administration. Clinton complied and sent in emails "spanning her time at the Department," and in the last month, after reviewing the emails, the department sent 300 of the emails to the Select Committee, which had requested the emails.

Federal law dictates that letters and emails written by officials like the secretary of state are to be considered government records.

Harf also stated that John Kerry is the first secretary of state whose primary work email is a state.gov account.

Jeb Bush, who recently released his own emails from his time as Florida governor and is mulling a run for the presidency, was quick to Tweet a response to Clinton's emails, calling for more of her emails: "Transparency matters. Unclassified @HillaryClinton emails should be released."

President Obama famously uses a secure Blackberry for his emails, which are all being recorded by the government. Bill Clinton has said he sent only two emails while he was president -- one to U.S. troops in the Adriatic and the other to John Glenn on the occasion of his 77th birthday, which he was celebrating in outer space. "I figured it was okay if Congress subpoenaed those," the former president said at a conference, according to Fast Company.

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Hillary Clinton used only personal email at State Dept.