text: Hillary Clinton’s camp late Sunday issued a significant clarification about the steps they say were taken to review thousands of personal emails before they were deleted, claiming her team individually read “every email” before discarding those deemed private. 
   
   Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill made the clarification in a written statement to Fox News. This comes after the former secretary of state’s office revealed last week that while more than 30,000 “work-related” emails were turned over to the State Department, nearly 32,000 were deemed “private” and deleted. 
   
   This admission raised questions over how her team decided to get rid of those messages. Merrill on Sunday clarified an earlier fact sheet that described some of those methods but did not say every email was read. 
   
   “We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental and exhaustive step that was performed. The fact sheet should have been clearer in stating that every email was read,” Merrill said. 
   
   Clinton, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, tried to tamp down the controversy over her exclusive use of personal email while secretary of state during a press conference last week. But the admission that she deleted thousands of messages, and her insistence that her personal server remain private, stirred the ire – and curiosity -- of lawmakers who want greater access to her communications as secretary and complain much of it may be gone forever. 
   
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   Whether the assurance that “every email” was read before being either deleted or turned over eases those concerns remains to be seen. 
   
   “I have zero interest in looking at her personal emails,” South Carolina GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy said on “Fox News Sunday.” “But who gets to decide what’s personal and what’s public? And if it’s a mixed-use email, and lots of the emails we get in life are both personal and work, I just can’t trust her lawyers to make the determination that the public’s getting everything they’re entitled to.” 
   
   Fox News' Ed Henry contributed to this report ||||| House Speaker John Boehner is expected to announce this week a new investigation into Hillary Clinton's email practices as Secretary of State, including her admission that more than 31,000 emails were destroyed because she determined them to be personal, top House Republicans told ABC News today. 
   
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   During a news conference last week, Clinton did not go into the details of how the review of her email was conducted, but said it was “thorough” and that she went “above and beyond” what she was required to do in turning over many of her emails to the State Department. 
   
   "We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department," she said, adding that all other emails were personal and pertained to matters such as "yoga routines," "family vacations," and "planning Chelsea's wedding." 
   
   After the news conference, Clinton’s team distributed a lengthy question-and-answer document that detailed the “multi-step” process. The process appeared to have included an extensive, nuanced search of Clinton’s inbox, but the document did not make clear how many of the emails were opened and read in the review. 
   
   On Sunday, Clinton’s spokesman clarified that “every email was read” and that the steps they outlined in the document “were in addition to reading them all, not in lieu of reading them all.” 
   
   According to the document, here is a summary of how Clinton’s attorneys, who were tasked with the job, said they sorted through her emails: 
   
   First, a search was done of all emails Clinton received from a .gov or state.gov account during the period she was secretary of state -- from 2009 to 2013. 
   
   Then, with the remaining emails, a search was done for names of 100 State Department and other U.S. government officials who Clinton may have had correspondence with during her tenure. 
   
   Next, the emails were organized and reviewed by sender and recipient to “account for non-obvious or non-recognizable email addresses or misspellings or other idiosyncrasies.” 
   
   Lastly, of the emails still left over, a "number of terms" were searched, including “Benghazi” and “Libya.” 
   
   The results of the search were that Clinton’s attorneys found 30,490 work-related emails and 31,830 emails that were deemed “private and personal.” 
   
   Clinton said on Tuesday she deleted all of the personal emails because she felt she “had no reason to save them.” 
   
   The revelation has only raised more questions among Clinton’s detractors about what was in those emails and why she used the private account in the first place. 
   
   Clinton said she did so out of “convenience,” but acknowledged during the news conference it “would have been better” if she had used two separate phones and two email accounts. 
   
   "I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously it hasn't worked out that way,” she said. 
   
   Democratic strategist and Clinton ally James Carville, speaking on “This Week,” said he suspected the former First Lady “didn't want [Rep.] Louis Gohmert rifling through her e-mails,” and added the controversy “amounts to nothing but a bunch of people flapping their jaws about nothing.” ||||| Hillary Clinton’s claim that most work-related emails sent from her personal account were preserved in the electronic files of other State Department officials fell apart Friday. 
   
   After a week of deflecting questions about how emails were handled during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the agency finally acknowledged that the email traffic of other senior officials was not automatically or routinely archived. 
   
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   The loose record-keeping practices, which were immediately criticized by historians and open government advocates, are only now being corrected. 
   
   “It’s very troubling,” said Nate Jones of the National Security Archive, a non-profit group which gathers and disseminates declassified government records. “People in the community of recordkeepers and historians had known that our history was at risk for a long time….It’s a wake up call, I think, for the public at large, which assumed everyone had Gmail capabilities and didn’t realize how backward the government was.” 
   
   The practices raise the possibility that many messages of historical importance were destroyed unless individual officials made a practice of saving their emails or printing out paper copies. 
   
   State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said it would be incorrect to call the emails destroyed since some might be retrievable through technology. But she acknowledged that regular archiving of the work email in-boxes of senior officials besides the secretary did not begin until “February of this year.” 
   
   “I wouldn’t state it’s ‘lost to history’ because there are technical means of gaining access to past information,” Psaki said. “I’m not an expert on the technical capabilities.” 
   
   Clinton had said at a news conference Tuesday that she believed the vast majority of work-related emails she sent or received from the private account, linked to a server at her New York residence, were “immediately captured and preserved” because she was in correspondence with other officials using “.gov” accounts. 
   
   But in another day of intense questioning from reporters, Psaki said automatic archiving began just last month for “dozens” of top officials — such as deputy secretaries, under secretaries and assistant secretaries. “Our goal is to apply this to all employee mailboxes by the end of 2016,” she said. 
   
   The state spokeswoman previously said Secretary of State John Kerry uses an official account and his emails have been archived since soon after he succeeded Clinton. 
   
   A Clinton spokesman had no comment on the department’s disclosure. 
   
   However, some transparency advocates said it’s now incumbent on the former secretary and likely 2016 presidential candidate to explain why she thought she was preserving her emails simply because they were sent to someone with a “.gov” address. 
   
   “She spoke as if she could just roll along with the firm expectation and belief that at least the ‘vast majority’ were being ‘handled’ in that way. From whence did that come? That’s the question that arises now,” said former Justice Department Office of Information and Privacy Director Dan Metcalfe, who now teaches on secrecy issues at American University’s law school. “What was her foundation for even that? Did someone incorrectly tell her that that was happening, or did she incorrectly make such a self-serving assumption?” 
   
   Psaki also revealed Friday that the department “recently” requested copies of work-related emails some current and former State officials had sent or received on private accounts. She said she believed the letter requesting such records was sent earlier this week and was related to investigations underway on Capitol Hill. 
   
   “There have obviously been requests from Congress for certain information,” Psaki said. She did not immediately have details on how widely the department’s request for current and former officials was distributed. 
   
   Clinton sent copies of 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department in December in response to a letter sent in October to her and three other former secretaries seeking copies of work-related records held in private accounts. State is now processing those emails for public release under Freedom of Information Act standards. 
   
   Clinton also said Tuesday that she disposed of about 32,000 emails on the same account after her lawyers determined the messages were personal in nature. 
   
   Psaki declined to answer reporters’ repeated questions about whether the department was satisfied with Clinton’s explanation for her use of a private email account as secretary. 
   
   Later in the briefing, however, Psaki suggested that there was confusion among some State Department employees about what was and was not being automatically saved. 
   
   “I assume some assumed that was happening at the time as well,” Psaki said. “We’re updating it because it’s an imperfect system.” 
   
   Speaking without reference to Clinton, Psaki said the duty was on individual employees to save records that met standards for permanent archiving. “Clearly, individuals — any top officials — would also be expected to preserve their documents,” she said. 
   
   Psaki said the move last month to begin archiving senior officials’ emails was not triggered by concerns about Clinton’s email practices. “They have long been planning to do this. It’s just something that it took some time to put in place,” she said. 
   
   Despite the State Department’s practice of not archiving top officials’ emails until recently, some of the emails were saved when employees printed them and put them in permanent files, saved them in electronic folders, or — in a specific agency system — marked them as permanent records. 
   
   “Obviously, this [automatic archiving] is a more efficient way — a way that will require less human effort….We have quite a bit going on here at the State Department,” Psaki said. “There were ways to preserve [emails] and employees and individuals were expected to do that prior to this new process.” 
   
   State’s disclosure Friday did expose a bizarre twist to Clinton’s decision to do all her e-mailing as secretary via a private account and server: some of those emails may be more accessible now as a result, given what appears to have been a default policy at state not to automatically archive official emails. 
   
   “That’s the silver lining, but it’s not the solution,” Jones said. “The solution is having the National Archives and Records Administration actually preserve the records in the first place. No one’s going to come out smelling like roses after this one.”
target: – Hillary Clinton's team has—somewhat belatedly—clarified that every one of the approximately 32,000 emails deemed "private" and deleted was opened and read before being chucked. The clarification comes a few days after a Time story claimed that the review involved searching by keywords and not checking every email. A Clinton spokesman blames the confusion on a fact sheet provided after a press conference last week, which mentioned keyword searches. "We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental, and exhaustive step that was performed," he said in a statement to Fox. "The fact sheet should have been clearer in stating that every email was read." But while the 31,830 emails appear to be gone forever, it doesn't look like the controversy for Clinton is going to go away anytime soon. House Speaker John Boehner plans to announce a new probe this week into Clinton's email use, including the deletions, according to ABC News, which cites "top House Republicans." And it's not just Clinton's emails that are gone: The State Department has admitted that routine archiving of the inboxes of senior officials only began last month. "It's very troubling," a spokesman for the National Security Archive group tells Politico. "People in the community of record-keepers and historians had known that our history was at risk for a long time."