Hillary Clinton used a single, non-governmental email account for all of her work as Secretary of State. When asked by the State Department for copies of those emails, Hillary’s personal staff sifted through them and decided which ones should be preserved.
In March 2013, The Smoking Gun website reported that the email account of Sid Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton confidant, had been hacked by someone calling himself “Guccifer.” Among the things found in Blumenthal’s account were emails sent to Hillary Clinton at a private account: hdr22@clintonemail.com. The emails included private greetings but also many instances of sensitive diplomatic information from intelligence sources, such as this memo on discussion taking place within the Libyan government circa January 2013.
According to the Times, Hillary’s private email is the only one she used during her entire tenure as Secretary of State. In fact, the domain was registered on her behalf on the same day her Senate hearings began.
Last year, the State Department asked Hillary and other former Secretaries to turn over email correspondence for preservation. Who decides which emails get turned over? According to the NY Times, that was left up to Hillary’s staff when they responded to the request:
It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s 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.
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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.
Granted, the government has whatever emails Hillary sent to other official accounts. Her people say she was careful to use those accounts for official business.
Ultimately, we have no way of knowing if that’s true. As it stands, Hillary decides what becomes a part of her archived government record. It appears that was her plan before she even took office.