Documents obtained by the Associated Press reveal that Clinton communicated with top advisers concerning drone strikes and surveillance programs using her iPad and private email address, hosted on a server at her property, instead of her official account, according to the Associated Press.
Confused handling of official and private business
The messages show that, at least once, Clinton mixed personal and professional affairs in her emails. Adviser Huma Abedin sent an email about drone strikes to Clinton’s personal email account, to which the then Secretary of State replied with questions that appear to be about furnishings.
Further emails included one which was forwarded from Abedin’s government email address to Clinton’s private one. Clinton later criticized leaks of classified government information to the media, asking whether she should make a comment on it. She called the leaks “dishonorable and dangerous.”
Clinton has come under fire for the insecure handling of government emails, which she says was a matter of convenience, allowing her to use only one device instead of two. Now it has been revealed that she did in fact use two devices, a Blackberry and an iPad.
“Looking back, it would have been probably, you know, smarter to have used two devices,” Clinton said. A statement from her office said that she “wanted the simplicity of using one device.”
Ongoing controversy
When the iPad was released in 2009, Clinton could have split her accounts, with professional emails on a Blackberry and personal emails on the iPad. Of the 60,000 emails exchanged in her four years in office, half were work-related. Clinton maintains that none of them contained classified information, and that security on her private email system was not breached.
The fact that Clinton ran her own email server means that she had complete control over archived messages, and she has been accused of clearing her records. Clinton says that she only deleted some 30,000 personal messages.
Clinton was asked to relinquish her server to a House committee looking into the 2012 Benghazi attacks, but has refused to do so, saying that no messages are contained on the server.
The iPad-email controversy looks set to dog Clinton for the foreseeable future and could affect a potential presidential bid, and a past quest for convenience could end up inconveniencing future plans.
