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A controversy arose in March 2015, when it was revealed publicly that Hillary Rodham Clinton had used personal email accounts on a non-government, privately maintained server—in lieu of email accounts maintained on secured Federal government servers—when conducting official business during her tenure as United States Secretary of State.

Clinton and her staff have stated that her use of the private email account was aboveboard and allowed under State Department rules. Clinton has stated that she did not send nor receive classified material on the private account. A government review of the emails, however, determined that some of the emails were deemed classified. Clinton, as well as State Department officials, said that classification designations can be complicated, especially when multiple government agencies are involved and are often not "black and white" decisions, and that sometimes information that was unclassified can be deemed classified at a later date. She further emphasized that none of the emails were marked with classification designations. On September 9, 2015, Clinton apologized for using a private email account, stating that she was sorry for doing so.

Some experts, officials, and members of Congress, contended that her use of that private messaging system, and the deletion of nearly 32,000 emails that she deemed private, violated State Department protocols and procedures, and Federal laws and regulations governing recordkeeping requirements.

The controversy occurred against the backdrop of Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign and hearings held by the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Background

At the time of the Senate confirmation hearing for Hillary Clinton's nomination to be Secretary of State, the domain names "clintonemail.com", "wjcoffice.com", and "presidentclinton.com" were registered to Eric Hoteham, with the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New York, as the contact address. The domains were pointed to a private email server that Clinton, who never had a "state.gov" email account, used to send and receive email. The server had been purchased and installed in the Clintons' home for her 2008 presidential campaign. It used Microsoft server software. Scans of the computer by a third party in 2012 showed open ports.

Other government officials, and Secretaries of State before her, had also used private email for official business, and experts agree that this is allowed by federal law "in case of emergencies". No evidence has emerged that "clintonemail.com" was ever actually compromised, but this could have exposed her communications as Secretary of State to a risk of hacking and foreign surveillance according to several security experts, including Chris Soghoian. Jason R. Baron, the former head of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), described the practice as "highly unusual", but not a violation of the law. In a separate interview, he said, "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."

Clinton's server

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According to documents and data reviewed by the Associated Press, Clinton's server was configured to allow users to connect openly from the Internet and control it remotely using the Microsoft remote desktop service, which was not intended for such use without additional protective measures, and was at the time the subject of U.S. government and industry warnings regarding the potential for attacks from even low-skilled intruders. The records showed that Clinton additionally operated two more devices on her home network that were also directly accessible from the Internet: one contained similar remote-control software that also has suffered from security vulnerabilities, known as Virtual Network Computing; and the other was configured to run websites. The Associated Press reviewed numerous records from an Internet "census" by an anonymous hacker-researcher, who in 2012 used unsecured devices to scan numerous Internet Protocol addresses for accessible doors, or "ports." These records showed that, using a computer in Serbia, a hacker had scanned Clinton's Chappaqua server at least twice, in August and December 2012. It was unclear from the reports whether the hacker knew the server belonged to Clinton, although it did identify itself as providing email services for clintonemail.com.

Until 2013, Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton, managed the system; Cooper had no security clearance or expertise in computer security. In 2013, Clinton hired Platte River Networks to manage her email system at a private data center in New Jersey. Datto, Inc., which provided data backup service for Clinton's email, agreed to give the FBI the hardware that stored the backups.

The Clintons personally paid Bryan Pagliano, the former IT director for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, to maintain the private email server while Clinton was Secretary of State. According to a Clinton campaign official, this ensured that taxpayer dollars would not be spent on a private server that was shared by Clinton, her husband and their daughter, as well as several aides to the former president. The State Department then hired Pagliano in May 2009 during Clinton's tenure, unaware that he was also collecting an outside income for his work for the Clintons, making him simultaneously employed by the Department and by the Clintons personally.

On September 1, 2015, Pagliano's attorney Mark MacDougall sent letters to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which had subpoenaed Pagliano, and to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was inquiring about Pagliano’s outside employment while a Federal employee, informing the committees that his client would invoke his constitutional Fifth Amendment rights not to answer any questions from the committees, and on September 10, in a closed-door session before the Benghazi Committee, Pagliano personally appeared to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify before the committee. Clinton’s former State Department chief of staff, Cheryl D. Mills, as well as Jake Sullivan, her former deputy chief of staff, each testified at closed meetings of the committee the week of September 1, 2015, and Clinton was scheduled to testify in open session on October 22, 2015.

Democrats downplayed the significance of Clinton's private email account, saying her use of personal email has been public knowledge for years, and that follows a pattern of use by previous secretaries of state; other government officials and Secretaries of State before her had also used private email for official business, and experts agree that this is allowed by federal law in case of emergencies. The State Department declined to answer questions about whether the private system was widely known within the agency or officially approved.

Admiral Michael Rogers head of the National Security Agency, described the email server as a "top priority for foreign intelligence services". As part of a Federal Bureau of Investigation investigation at the request of the United States Intelligence Community's inspector general, Clinton agreed to turn over her email server to the Department of Justice, as well as thumb drives containing copies of her work-related emails. Other emails were obtained by the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was conducting its own inquiry. Emails are being made public in bundles on a gradual schedule.

Public attention

As early as 2009, NARA officials expressed concerns over possible violations of normal federal government record-keeping procedures at the Department of State under Secretary Clinton.

Emails sent to Clinton's private clintonemail.com address were first discovered in March 2013, when a hacker named "Guccifer" widely distributed emails sent to her from Sidney Blumenthal, obtained by illegally accessing Blumenthal's email account. The emails dealt with the 2012 attack on the Benghazi consulate and other issues in Libya and revealed the existence of her clintonemail.com address.

A March 2, 2015 New York Times article broke the story that Clinton had exclusively used her own private email server rather than a government-issued one throughout her time as U.S. Secretary of State, and that her aides took no action to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts as required by law. Some in the conservative media labeled the controversy "emailgate".

On March 27, 2015, Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy, Chairman of the Benghazi panel, asserted that some time after October 2014, Clinton "unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean" and "summarily decided to delete all emails." Clinton's attorney, David E. Kendall, said that day that an examination showed that no copies of any of Clinton's emails remained on the server. Kendall said the server was reconfigured to only retain emails for 60 days after Clinton lawyers had decided which emails needed to be turned over.

On September 8, 2015, FactCheck.org posted an article discussing Hillary Clinton's responses to her email account, starting with her March 3 press briefing through September 7. Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in May that "any employee's decision to conduct all email correspondence through a private email network, using a non-.gov address, is inconsistent with long-established policies and practices under the Federal Records Act and NARA regulations governing all federal agencies."

Clinton's initial response

A spokesman for former Secretary Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the personal server and email accounts, contending that she had complied with the "letter and spirit of the rules," and Clinton herself stated that she had done so only as a matter of "convenience."

On March 10, 2015, while attending a conference at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, Clinton spoke with reporters for about 20 minutes. Clinton said that she had used a private email for convenience, because she did not want to carry two phones. She said that her staff would be turning over copies of 30,000 emails from her private server from her time at the State Department that she believed belonged in the public domain. She said that they had deleted another 32,000 emails from the server from that same time period, that she regarded as personal and private. It was later determined that Clinton had used both an iPad and a Blackberry while Secretary of State.

Initial response of Republican Party

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said, in a statement regarding the June 30 email releases, "These emails ... are just the tip of the iceberg, and we will never get full disclosure until Hillary Clinton releases her secret server for an independent investigation." Gowdy, a Republican, said on June 29, 2015 that he would press the State Department for a fuller accounting of Clinton’s emails, after the Benghazi panel obtained 15 additional emails to Sidney Blumenthal that the department had not provided to the Committee.

House Committee subpoenas for Department testimony

On June 22, 2015, the Select Committee on Benghazi released emails between Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal, who had been recently deposed by the Committee. Committee chairman Gowdy issued a press release criticizing Clinton for not providing the emails to the State Department. Clinton had said she provided all work-related emails to the State Department, and that only emails of a personal nature on her private server were destroyed. The State Department confirmed that 10 emails and parts of five others from Sidney Blumenthal regarding Benghazi, which the Committee had made public on June 22, could not be located in the Department's records, but that the 46 other, previously unreleased Libya-related Blumenthal emails published by the Committee, were in the Department's records. In response, Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, when asked about the discrepancy said: "She has turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State Department, including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal."

Republican Committee members were encouraged about their probe, having found emails that Clinton did not produce. Clinton campaign staff accused Gowdy and Republicans of "clinging to their invented scandal."

Interviews

In her first national interview of the 2016 Presidential race, with CNN's Brianna Keilar, on July 7, 2015, Clinton was asked about her use of private email accounts while serving as Secretary of State. She said:

Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate. Previous secretaries of state have said they did the same thing…. Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation. I had one device. When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system.

On September 9, 2015, Clinton apologized during an ABC News interview for using the private server, saying she was "sorry for that."

Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on September 27, 2015, Clinton defended her use of the private email server while she was secretary of state, comparing the investigations to Republican-led probes of her husband's presidential administration more than two decades ago, saying, "It is like a drip, drip, drip. And that's why I said, there's only so much that I can control".

Freedom of Information lawsuits

Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State

Judicial Watch, a nonprofit advocacy organization, filed a complaint against the Department of State in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on September 10, 2013, seeking records under the federal Freedom of Information Act relating to Clinton aide Huma Abedin (a former deputy chief of staff and former senior advisor at the State Department). Judicial Watch was particularly interested in Abedin's role as a "special government employee" (SGE), a consulting position which allowed her to represent outside clients while also serving at the State Department. After corresponding with the State Department, Judicial Watch agreed to dismiss its lawsuit on March 14, 2014. On March 12, 2015, in response to the uncovering of Clinton's private email account, it filed a motion to reopen the suit, alleging that the State Department had misrepresented its search and had not properly preserved and maintained records under the act. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted the motion to reopen the case on June 19, 2015.

On July 21, 2015, Judge Sullivan issued supplemental discovery orders, including one that Clinton, Abedin, and former Deputy Secretary of State Cheryl Mills disclose any required information they had not disclosed already, and promise under oath that they had done so, including a description of the extent Abedin and Mills had used Clinton's email server for official government business. On August 10, 2015, Clinton filed her declaration, stating "I have directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State," and that as a result of this directive, 55,000 pages of emails were produced to the Department on December 5, 2014. Clinton also said in her statement that Abedin did have an email account through clintonemail.com that "was used at times for government business," but that Mills did not. The statement was filed as Clinton faced questions over fifteen emails in exchanges with Blumenthal that were not among the emails she gave to the department the previous year. She did not address the matter of those emails in the statement. On September 25, 2015, several additional emails from her private server surfaced that she had not provided to the State Department. These emails of her and General Petraeus discussing personnel matters were part of a chain that started on a different email account before her tenure as Secretary of State, but continued onto her private server in late January 2009 after she had taken office. The existence of these emails also called into question Clinton's previous statement that she did not use the server before March 18, 2009.

Jason Leopold v. U.S. Department of State

In November 2014, Jason Leopold of Vice News made a Freedom of Information Act request for Clinton's State Department records, and, on January 25, 2015, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to compel production of resposive documents. After some dispute between Leopold and the State Department over the request, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered rolling production and release of the emails on a schedule set by the State Department.

The State Department released the first batch of emails and posted them online on May 26, 2015, and the second batch on June 30, 2015. The emails showed that Blumenthal communicated with Clinton while Secretary on a variety of issues including Benghazi. On July 31, 2015, the State Department produced its third batch of emails.

On August 17, 2015, the State Department filed a court document in the case saying that it had reviewed 6,100 emails (20 percent of the full email set), and of these had referred 305 emails to the various intelligence agencies for further screening for classified information.

Associated Press v. U.S. Department of State

On March 11, 2015, the day after Clinton acknowledged her private email account, the Associated Press filed suit against the State Department regarding multiple FOIA requests over the past five years. The requests were for various emails and other documents from Clinton's time as secretary of state and were still unfulfilled at the time. The State Department said that a high volume of FOIA requests and a large backlog had caused the delay.

On July 20, 2015, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon reacted angrily to what he said was "the State Department for four years dragging their feet." Leon said that "even the least ambitious bureaucrat" could process the request faster than the State Department was doing. On August 7, 2015, Leon issued an order setting a stringent schedule for the State Department to provide the AP with the requested documents over the next eight months. The order issued by Leon did not include the 55,000 pages of Clinton emails the State Department scheduled to be released in the Leopold case, or take into account 20 boxes given to the State Department by Philippe Reines, a former Clinton senior adviser.

Coordination of email cases

In September 2015, the State Department filed a motion in court seeking to consolidate and coordinate the large number of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits relating to Clinton and Clinton-related emails. At least three dozen lawsuits are pending, before 17 different judges.

In an United States District Court for the District of Columbia order issued on October 8, 2015, chief judge Richard W. Roberts wrote that the cases did not meet the usual criteria for consolidation but: "The judges who have been randomly assigned to these cases have been and continue to be committed to informal coordination so as to avoid unnecessary inefficiencies and confusion, and the parties are also urged to meet and confer to assist in coordination."

Proposed independent review

On September 12, 2015, Senators Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson, chairmen of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, respectively, said they will push for the deleted emails to be independently reviewed if they can, in fact, be recovered. The Justice Department (DOJ), on behalf of the State Department, however, has argued that personal emails are not federal records, that courts lack the jurisdiction to demand their preservation, and defended Clinton's email practices in a court filing on September 9, 2015. DOJ lawyers argued that federal employees, including Clinton, are allowed to discard personal emails provided they preserve those pertaining to public business. "There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server," the DOJ lawyers wrote in their filing.

Classified information in emails

Questions were raised about whether Clinton passed classified information through her mail server, which would be improper because it was a private, non-secured channel.

Official statements

A June 29, 2015 memorandum from the inspector general of the State Department, Steve A. Linick, said that a review of the 55,000-page email release found "hundreds of potentially classified emails". A July 17, 2015 follow-up memo, sent jointly by Linick and the Intelligence Community inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, to Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, stated that they had confirmed that several of the emails contained classified information that was not marked as classified, at least one of which was publicly released. On July 24, 2015, Linick and McCullough said they had discovered classified information on Clinton's email account, but did not say whether Clinton sent or received the emails. Investigators from their office, searching a randomly chosen sample of 40 emails, found four that contained classified information that originated from U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Their statement said that the information they found was classified when sent, remained so as of their inspection, and "never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system."

In a separate statement in the form of a letter to Congress, McCullough said that he had made a request to the State Department for access to the entire set of 30,000 emails turned over by Clinton, but that the Department rejected his request. The letter said that Clinton's lawyer, David E. Kendall, was "purported" to also have copies of the emails on a thumb drive. The letter stated further that none of the emails were marked as classified, but because they included classified information they should have been marked and handled as such, and transmitted securely.

On August 10, 2015, the Intelligence Community inspector general said that two of the 40 emails in the sample were "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information" and subsequently given classified labels of "TK" (for "Talent Keyhole," indicating material obtained by spy satellites) and NOFORN. One is a discussion of a news article about a US drone strike operation, which though covert are widely known. The second, he said, might have referred to classified material but also might have been "parallel reporting" of Open-source intelligence, which would also be classified. Sensitive compartmented information (SCI) is a type of United States classified information concerning or derived from sensitive intelligence sources, methods, or analytical processes. SCI is required to be handled with formal access control systems established by the Director of National Intelligence.

Clinton’s presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the Intelligence Community inspector general’s August 10 finding, and questioned whether the emails had been over-classified by an arbitrary process. According to an unnamed source, a secondary review by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency endorsed the earlier inspector generals findings concluding that the emails (one of which concerned North Korea’s nuclear weapons program) were in fact "Top Secret," the highest classification of government intelligence, when they were received by Secretary Clinton through her private server in 2009 and 2011. The Clinton campaign disagreed with that conclusion noting that governmental agencies often have different views of what should be considered classified.

Journalists and experts

There have been conflicting assessments on whether information in Clinton's emails was classified and, whether classified or not, whether it should have been classified.

Regarding classified status, according to the New York Times, if Clinton was a recipient of classified emails, "it is not clear that she would have known that they contained government secrets, since they were not marked classified." Some of Clinton's emails were marked classified only after the fact. Reuters analyzed some of those email messages stamped as classified. Dozens included content that some news sources presume to be, or believe should be, classified whether they were marked classified or not according to U.S. regulations "It's born classified," according to William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). "If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession."

The Associated Press reported that "Some officials said they believed the designations were a stretch — a knee-jerk move in a bureaucracy rife with over-classification." Jeffrey Toobin, in an August 2015 New Yorker article, wrote that the Clinton email affair is an illustration of overclassification, a problem written about by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book Secrecy: The American Experience. Toobin writes that "government bureaucracies use classification rules to protect turf, to avoid embarrassment, to embarrass rivals—in short, for a variety of motives that have little to do with national security", and that "It's not only the public who cannot know the extent or content of government secrecy. Realistically, government officials can’t know either—and this is Hillary Clinton's problem." Toobin writes that "according to media reports, one of Clinton’s potentially classified email exchanges is nothing more than a discussion of a newspaper story about drones. That such a discussion could be classified underlines the absurdity of the current system."

Former intelligence officials believe it likely that emails stored on Clinton's unencrypted private server "were targeted and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA," but specialists in the field have also expressed doubt that significant classified information was released. According to The New York Times, "most specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in the Clinton account was probably of marginal consequence." Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said that inadvertent "spillage" of classified information into an unclassified realm is a common occurrence.

Clinton response

Clinton's responses to the question, made in the context of her campaign for the U.S. Presidency, have evolved over time. Clinton initially said that there was no classified material on her server. Later, after a government review discovered some of her emails contained classified information, she said she never sent or received information that was marked classified. Her campaign also said that other emails contained information that is now classified, but was retroactively classified by U.S. intelligence agencies after Clinton had received the material. Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said: "She was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified." Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri has "stressed that Clinton was permitted to use her own email account as a government employee and that the same process concerning classification reviews would still be taking place had she used the standard 'state.gov' email account used by most department employees." Downplaying the seriousness of the events, Palmieri said: "Look, this kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for president. We know it, Hillary knows it, and we expect it to continue from now until Election Day."

FBI investigation

The State Department and Intelligence Community inspector generals' discovery of four emails containing classified information, out of a random sample of 40, prompted them to make a security referral to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's counterintelligence office, to alert authorities that classified information was being kept on Clinton's server and by her lawyer on a thumb drive.

Clinton's contractors turned over her personal email server to the FBI in the Department of Justice, as well as thumb drives containing copies of her emails, on August 12, 2015. In a letter describing the matter to Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Clinton's lawyer David Kendall said that emails, and all other data stored on the server, had earlier been erased prior to the device being turned over to the authorities, and that both he and another lawyer had been given security clearances by the State Department to handle thumb drives containing about 30,000 emails that Clinton subsequently also turned over to authorities. Kendall said the thumb drives had been stored in a safe provided to him in July by the State Department.

On August 20, 2015, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan stated that Hillary Clinton's actions of maintaining a private email server were in direct conflict with US Government policy. "We wouldn’t be here today if this employee had followed government policy," he said, and ordered the State Department to work with the FBI to determine if any emails on the server during her tenure as Secretary of State could be recovered. Platte River Networks, the Denver-based firm that managed the Clinton server since 2013, said it had no knowledge of the server being wiped, and indicated that the emails that Clinton has said were deleted could likely be recovered. "Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped," company spokesman Andy Boian told the Washington Post. "All the information we have is that the server wasn’t wiped." When asked by the Washington Post, the Clinton campaign declined to comment. As of September 2015 FBI investigators were engaged in sorting messages recovered from the server.

White House response

On October 11, 2015, President Obama commented on the controversy during an interview on 60 Minutes, saying that it was a "legitimate issue", but that he did not think that Clinton's use of a private email server to conduct government business when she was Secretary of State endangered national security. Obama added: "I think she'd be the first to acknowledge that maybe she could have handled the original decision better and the disclosures more quickly." Obama said that public officials should be more sensitive about how they handle information and personal data, yet that the criticism of Clinton had been primarily "ginned up" because of politics.

According to FBI officials, investigators have not reached any conclusions yet about whether the information on Clinton's server was compromised, or whether to recommend charges, but were concerned that the President's comments made it sound as if he had already determined the answers to their questions, and had cleared anyone involved of wrongdoing. FBI Director James Comey acknowledged the difficulties posed by the email investigation, saying that one reason he has a 10-year term is "to make sure this organization stays outside of politics", adding, "If you know my folks, you know they don’t give a rip about politics."

Comparisons and media coverage

Media commentators have made drawn comparisons of Clinton's email usage to past political controversies. Pacific Standard Magazine published an article in May 2015, comparing email controversy and her response to it with the Whitewater Investigation 20 years earlier. On August 19, 2015, Washington Post associate editor and investigative journalist, Bob Woodward, when asked about Clinton's handling of her emails, said "they remind him of the Nixon tapes" from the Watergate scandal. On March 9, 2015, Dana Milbank of the Chicago Tribune wrote that the "email fiasco shows that she's her own worst enemy", pointing out that Clinton herself had justifiably criticized the George W. Bush administration in 2007 for its "secret" White House email accounts.

On Fox News Sunday, political analyst Juan Williams contrasted the media coverage of Clinton's emails to the coverage of the 2007 Bush White House email controversy.

Allegations of politicization

On September 29, 2015, Republican Kevin McCarthy said the following during an appearance on Hannity "Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."

In response, Pelosi threatened to pull the Democrats from the committee, and the Democrats on the committee released the full Mills testimony, which Republicans had refused to release. As Democrats considered filing a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics, Louise Slaughter introduced an amendment to end the committee, which was defeated in a party-line vote. Steny Hoyer indicated that Democrats might leave the committee after Clinton's testimony, scheduled for October 22. The editorial board of The New York Times called for the end of the committee on October 7, by which time the committee had spent $4.6 million. Alan Grayson took the step of filing an ethics complaint, alleging that the committee violates both House rules and federal law by using official funds for political purposes, while calling the committee "the new McCarthyism".

In October 2015, Bradley F. Podliska, who worked on the committee as a staffer, claimed that the purpose of the committee is political, and that he was fired from the committee for not focusing his research on Clinton. Also, Richard Hanna, a Republican representative from New York, and conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly acknowledged the partisan nature of the committee.

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External links

• Statement on NARA’s Records Management Activities Relating to the State Department by the National Archives and Records Administration
• Clinton explainer on emails

v t e Hillary Clinton
11th Chancellor of Queen's University Belfast (2020–present) 67th United States Secretary of State (2009–2013) US Senator from New York (2001–2009) First Lady of the United States (1993–2001) First Lady of Arkansas (1979–1981, 1983–1992)
Secretary of State	Tenure as Secretary Foreign trips Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review Foreign policy of the Obama administration Hillary Doctrine Email controversy UN Security Council Resolution 1888 UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict
US senator	Senate career Family Entertainment Protection Act Flag Protection Act of 2005
First Lady	Tenure as First Lady 1993 health care reform Hillaryland Travel office controversy FBI files controversy "Vast right-wing conspiracy" Vital Voices Save America's Treasures State Children's Health Insurance Program Adoption and Safe Families Act Foster Care Independence Act White House Millennium Council
Arkansas	Legal career Career in corporate governance Tenures as First Lady of Arkansas Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families Rose Law Firm Legal Services Corporation Whitewater controversy Cattle futures controversy
Philanthropic	Clinton Foundation State Department controversy Onward Together
Speeches and policies	Political positions "Women's Rights Are Human Rights" (1995) "Basket of deplorables" (2016)
Writings	Bibliography Senior thesis (1969) It Takes a Village (1996) Dear Socks, Dear Buddy (1998) An Invitation to the White House (2000) Living History (2003) Hard Choices (2014) Stronger Together (2016) What Happened (2017) The Book of Gutsy Women (2019) State of Terror (2021)
Electoral history	Senatorial elections 2000 US Senate election in New York 2006 US Senate election in New York 2008 Democratic presidential primaries Campaign Endorsements Debates Convention 2016 US presidential election Campaign Endorsements political non-political screen and stage performers other celebrities Democratic primaries debates running mate selection convention Democratic opposition General election debates Hillary Victory Fund
Legacy	Awards and honors Books about Public image Clinton National Airport
Popular culture	Hillary 1984 Saturday Night Live parodies Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women (2015 documentary) Hillary and Clinton (2016 play) Hillary (2020 documentary)
Family	Bill Clinton (husband presidency) Chelsea Clinton (daughter) Hugh E. Rodham (father) Dorothy Howell Rodham (mother) Hugh Rodham (brother) Tony Rodham (brother) Socks (cat) Buddy (dog) Whitehaven (residence)
Other	Situation Room (2011 photograph) Activities after 2016

• 2015 controversies
• 2015 in American politics
• Computing-related controversies and disputes
• Diplomatic correspondence
• Hillary Clinton
• Political controversies in the United States