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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email account to exclusively conduct official business during her time at the State Department, a move that raises questions about access to the full archive of her correspondence, as well as the possibility that she violated federal law requiring official messages to be retained for the record.

The existence of the account was discovered by the House select committee investigating the deadly 2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and was first reported by The New York Times.

Clinton did not even have a government email address during her tenure as America's top diplomat, which lasted from 2009 to 2013, and The Times reports that her aides took no action to preserve her emails on department servers, as required by the Federal Records Act.

Instead, the paper reports, Clinton's advisers selected which of her emails to turn over to the State Department for archival purposes after going through tens of thousands of pages of correspondence. The department said late Monday that it had received 55,000 pages of Clinton's emails as part of a request made to previous secretaries of state to turn over any official documents they may have had in their possession.

It is not clear how many total emails from that period were in Clinton's personal account, nor is it clear how Clinton's advisers decided which emails to hand over to the State Department.

Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, said the former secretary of state expected that emails to State Department officials -- which she sent to department accounts -- would be preserved. "When the Department asked former Secretaries last year for help ensuring their emails were in fact retained, we immediately said yes," he said. "Both the letter and spirit of the rules permitted State Department officials to use non-government email, as long as appropriate records were preserved."

The fate of emails to foreign leaders, private citizens, and non-State Department officials is unclear.

"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," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf told Fox News late Monday. Harf added that the department turned over about 300 emails to the Benghazi select committee, and noted that Clinton's successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, "is the first ... to rely primarily on a state.gov email account."

According to the Times, however, while past secretaries of state often used personal email, updated regulations required such emails to be preserved.

Clinton and her aides reportedly did not follow that requirement at the time -- until her office turned over documents.

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