AP Photo Hillary Clinton used private email account for State Department business Emails sent by Clinton from her personal account weren't archived in official government records. 
 
 Thousands of emails Hillary Clinton generated as secretary of state were not archived as official government records because she used a private email account to conduct State Department business, the State Department acknowledged Monday. 
 
 Aides to the former secretary of state turned over 55,000 pages of emails from her personal account to the State Department in December at its request, a department official said. 
 
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 Clinton’s use of the personal account for work-related emails and the State Department’s effort to gain control over the information were first reported by The New York Times. Clinton did not use a State Department email account, the paper reported. 
 
 “Last year, the Department sent a letter to representatives of former secretaries of state requesting they submit any records in their possession for proper preservation. In response to our request, Secretary Clinton provided the Department with emails spanning her time at the Department,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement. 
 
 The Times story suggested that the private email trove came to light as the State Department worked to respond to requests for information from a special House committee probing the deaths of four Americans in a 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. 
 
 However, a State Department official who asked not to be named said Monday night that the request to Clinton and other former secretaries took place in October of last year and was independent of any inquiries from the Benghazi panel. 
 
 Psaki did acknowledge that the set of emails Clinton aides gave to the department recently contained some records relevant to the Benghazi committee’s document demands. 
 
 “After the State Department reviewed [Clinton’s] emails, we produced about 300 e-mails responsive to recent requests from the Select Committee” on Benghazi, Psaki said. 
 
 A bill President Barack Obama signed last November declared that official messages sent on personal email accounts must be copied to an employee’s official account or forwarded to such an account within 20 days. The law, which was not retroactive, allowed employees to be subject to disciplinary action for failing to archive records but it did not carry criminal penalties. 
 
 The disclosure about official emails in Clinton’s private email account comes following a flurry of reports about foreign fundraising by the Clinton Foundation as well as paid speeches by President Bill Clinton during his wife’s tenure as secretary of state. 
 
 Some of the stories, linked to Hillary Clinton’s expected announcement of presidential campaign in the coming months, have raised questions about the transparency and rigor of an ethics agreement that led to vetting of the former president’s speeches and business dealings. 
 
 It’s not illegal for an official to use a private email account for government business, but copies of all official emails are supposed to be forwarded to an official account so that they can be archived in accordance with government records laws. 
 
 Clinton’s emails were not archived on government’s servers, the Times said. 
 
 The fact that Clinton’s emails were not a part of official State Department records until recently means many of them would not have been located in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, subpoenas or other document searches conducted over the past six years. 
 
 That omission seems certain to generate controversy, litigation and more news coverage as various entities demand access to the email trove just as Clinton’s campaign for the White House is expected to be getting underway. 
 
 A potential rival of Clinton in the presidential campaign, former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), called on the former secretary of state to make the collection of emails public. 
 
 “Hillary Clinton should release her emails. Hopefully she hasn’t already destroyed them,” Bush spokeswoman Kristy Campbell said. “Governor Bush believes transparency is a critical part of public service and of governing.” 
 
 Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill emphasized to the Times that emails Clinton sent to other government officials at their official accounts would have been archived as part of those accounts. In her statement, Psaki made the same point. 
 
 It appears, though, that until the recent retrieval of Clinton’s private emails, there would have been no official record of the secretary’s electronic correspondence with foreign officials or private individuals outside the government. 
 
 A bulletin issued by the National Archives and Records Administration in August 2013 said that “agency employees should not generally use personal email accounts to conduct official agency business.” 
 
 Although that notice emerged about eight months after Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, there were a variety of highly publicized public controversies prior to that time about officials using private email servers for official work. 
 
 In 2007, the Republican National Committee announced that a large volume of emails generated by 22 officials in President George W. Bush’s White House, including political adviser Karl Rove, had been deleted and were unavailable for congressional investigators. The officials used the GOP email system in an effort to separate official and political work, but may sometimes have mixed the two. 
 
 At the time, Democrats were highly critical of the practice. 
 
 In 2010, the then-chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) complained about reports that White House officials were using their personal emails to arrange meetings with lobbyists. 
 
 And in 2012, the House Energy and Commerce Committee reported that Obama aide Jim Messina used his personal email account to arrange a meeting with a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist during a critical moment for health-care reform legislation in 2010. 
 
 Back then, the White House said that officials who used personal accounts for official business were expected to forward those emails to official accounts. It is unclear whether Messina ever did. 
 
 Psaki said Monday that Secretary of State John Kerry is using official email and it is being properly archived. 
 
 “The Department is in the process of updating our records preservation policies to bring them in line with recent 2013 National Archives and Records Administration guidance. These steps include regularly archiving all of Secretary Kerry’s emails to ensure that we are capturing all federal records,” she said. ||||| A House investigative committee issued subpoenas late Wednesday afternoon to the State Department, seeking a deeper look into former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s nearly exclusive use of personal e-mails to do her official business during her tenure, the committee confirmed Wednesday. 
 
 The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which first discovered Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail based on a home server in its inquiry into a fatal 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, is asking for all e-mails related to the attack from all Clintonemail.com accounts and any other staff members’ personal accounts. 
 
 “The Select Committee on Benghazi today issued subpoenas for all communications of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton related to Libya and to the State Department for other individuals who have information pertinent to the investigation,” according to a statement by committee spokesman Jamal Ware. “The Committee also has issued preservation letters to internet firms informing them of their legal obligation to protect all relevant documents.” 
 
 The move escalates the panel’s conflict with Clinton and could complicate her expected run for president. 
 
 [The Hillary Clinton e-mail story just keeps getting worse for her] 
 
 Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail address that she used while secretary of state reinforces everything people don’t like about her, argues The Post’s Chris Cillizza, and is very dangerous to her presidential ambitions. (The Washington Post) 
 
 Numerous federal records and legal experts have questioned Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail for government business and whether it violated the Federal Records Act. Her practice was first reported by the New York Times on Monday. 
 
 Committee staff learned of the Clintonemail.com domain name in reviewing records they obtained this summer, according to one person familiar with deliberations. Staffers later discovered evidence suggesting that “at least a small group of Clinton staffers” was using personal e-mails to conduct government work and correspond with the secretary, the person said. 
 
 [Hacked e-mails indicate Hillary Clinton used a domain registered the day of her Senate hearings] 
 
 The White House on Tuesday said Clinton appeared to have operated in violation of “very specific guidance” from the West Wing that members of the Obama administration use government e-mail accounts to carry out official business. 
 
 The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said it would also look into what its chairman, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), said was a frequent violation of the law. Chaffetz said his inquiry would look at whether Clinton viewed classified or sensitive material on a personal account. 
 
 [White House says Clinton did not heed e-mail policy] 
 
 “Do you really believe that the secretary of state never reviewed classified information on her e-mail?” Chaffetz said. 
 
 A State Department spokeswoman said this week there was no indication Clinton used her private e-mail for classified information. 
 
 Tom Hamburger contributed to this report. ||||| WASHINGTON A growing controversy over Democrat Hillary Clinton's use of personal email for work while she was U.S. secretary of state could drag on for months, threatening to cloud the expected launch of her 2016 presidential campaign. 
 
 Clinton tried to cool the brewing firestorm late on Wednesday, saying she wanted the State Department to release the emails quickly. But a senior State Department official told Reuters on Thursday the task would take time. 
 
 "The review is likely to take several months given the sheer volume of the document set," the official said. 
 
 At the same time, the department is investigating whether Clinton violated policies intended to protect sensitive information when she conducted all of her official business through a personal account while serving as secretary from 2009 to 2013, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing a senior department official. 
 
 Using personal email did not automatically break rules, but the department is determining whether work emails sent from that private account contained information that must be handled on a system meeting specific security protocols, the Washington Post reported. 
 
 The State Department has said there was no prohibition during Clinton's tenure on using personal email for official business as long as it was preserved. It had no immediate comment on the Washington Post report. 
 
 Fox News on Thursday released a State Department cable sent from the secretary's office in 2011 reviewing some email policies that encouraged employees to avoid conducting official business from personal accounts. 
 
 An extended review or investigation could dash any Clinton hopes of putting the controversy to rest quickly. 
 
 "I want the public to see my email," Clinton said in a tweet. "I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible." 
 
 The controversy landed Clinton in trouble just as she prepares to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. It has prompted some Democrats to wonder whether someone else should be their candidate in the bid to succeed President Barack Obama. 
 
 A total of 55,000 pages of documents covering the time Clinton was in office has been turned over, according to the State Department. But Clinton and her aides controlled that process, and the emails were not archived on government servers. 
 
 Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters during a visit to Saudi Arabia that the State Department would review the documents "as rapidly as possible." 
 
 Clinton's tweeted statement came hours after a congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, subpoenaed her emails. 
 
 The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Benghazi demanded all Clinton communications related to the incident and told Internet companies to protect relevant documents. 
 
 The panel's Republican chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, told reporters he wanted the documents within two weeks or a "really good explanation" for why not. 
 
 Republicans have scrutinized Clinton's actions regarding the Benghazi attack in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed and have also criticized Clinton's transparency and ethics. The former first lady and U.S. senator has been a lightning rod for Republican detractors dating back to the administration of her husband, former President Bill Clinton. 
 
 Clinton is the presumptive favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, and there was no sign the controversy was forcing a change of plans. A Democratic source familiar with campaign planning said to expect a Clinton announcement on her intentions in the spring. 
 
 The Republican National Committee's top lawyer on Thursday asked the State Department's inspector general to investigate if Clinton's email use violated federal law. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Amanda Becker, Lisa Lambert and Peter Cooney; Writing by John Whitesides; Editing by Leslie Adler and Lisa Shumaker)
– Hillary Clinton's personal email account may soon head for the public domain after all. Following news that a House committee on Benghazi would subpoena her emails, the former secretary of state tweeted yesterday, "I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible." That won't be instantaneous, says a State Department rep, who notes that "given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete." Aides for Clinton, who exclusively used a personal clintonemail.com email account while at the State Department, say she believed her emails would be collected as they were sent to government accounts, CNN reports. One adds "nine out of 10 emails that she sent over the course of her tenure went to the State Department." Others, however, have criticized her use of personal email as having made government communications vulnerable to attackers, because, as an ACLU technology expert tells Wired, "although the American people didn't know about this, it's almost certain that foreign intelligence agencies did, just as the NSA knows which Indian and Spanish officials use Gmail and Yahoo accounts." Clinton's email account was traced to a server registered to "Eric Hoteham." That's actually a typo: Former Clinton aide Eric P. Hothem now works in finance, the New York Times reports. Another former aide, Justin Cooper, registered the domain name, clintonemail.com, which expires in 2017. The Times notes having an address from clintonemail.com was "a symbol of status within the family's inner circle, conferring prestige and closeness to the secretary." Chelsea Clinton and longtime aide Huma Abedin are two within that group, though Chelsea's used a pseudonym: Diane Reynolds.