NEW YORK: Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton violated rules by using her personal email account to conduct official business, US State Department officials told the New York Times on Monday.

The officials said Hillary Clinton may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

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

It was only two months ago, in response to a State Department effort to comply with record-keeping practices, that 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. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s 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.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2015

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