Hillary Clinton was asked about personal email address two years ago
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asked Hillary Clinton about her use of personal email in her capacity as secretary of state as far back as two years ago. Clinton ignored the question, while the State Department provided a broad response with general information about the department's email policies.
The Committee asked Clinton about her emails in December 2012 as part of a broader investigation into the Obama administration's email and record keeping, the New York Times first reported.
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The State Department responded in March 2013, about a month after Clinton left the administration. The department wrote that according to its management policies, "employees may use personal email on personal time for matters not directly related to official business, and any employee using personal email 'should make it clear that his or her personal email is not being used for official business.'"
Last month, it was revealed that Clinton used a private server to store her emails while serving as secretary of state. She is making some of the emails she sent from that server public; however, she has already permanently deleted about half of the emails on the server, arguing that they were private in nature.
Clinton has said she used a personal email address as a matter of convenience.
"I opted for convenience to use my personal email account which was allowed by the State Department because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two," she said last month. "Looking back it would have been better if I had simply used a second email account and carried a second phone but at the time, this didn't seem like an issue."
