What we know about Hillary Clinton's private email account

WASHINGTON -- Once again, Hillary Rodham Clinton did it her way, and it could cost her.

Clinton's decision to eschew government email and use a private server as secretary of state is raising questions about secrecy, security and the law -- including whether she might have deleted messages tapped into her BlackBerry instead of preserving them for public scrutiny and history.

At the least, the controversy is a bump on her unprecedented path from first lady to presumed presidential contender.

What we know so far:

What's different about Clinton's email?

She did all her official work as the nation's top diplomat using a personal email account. Federal officials generally are expected to use their agencies' email systems -- the kind of addresses that have ".gov" at the end.

Clinton didn't use a commercial email server, like Google operates for Gmail, either. She had her own email server, traced to her hometown in Chappaqua, New York. The address: hdr22@clintonemail.com.

Prior secretaries of state also used nongovernment email for work at times, or avoided using email much at all. Indeed, the State Department says the current secretary, John Kerry, is the first to have an official "@state.gov" address like other employees use routinely.

The volume of the Clinton documents -- she's turned over 55,000 pages -- makes her use of personal email more striking.

Did she do anything wrong?

It raises two opposing sets of questions:

• Was Clinton's email too secret?

A private account could have allowed her to withhold or destroy messages she's legally required to turn over for congressional investigations or lawsuits or to make available to the public, the press and historians under open-records law.

• Was Clinton's email too exposed?

A private email server may have left her sensitive government communications vulnerable to people who shouldn't see them, such as hackers and spies, because it lacked the security of government accounts.

The answers are fuzzy.

Clinton says she's turned over all relevant emails to the State Department. The House committee investigating the deadly attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, has issued subpoenas seeking messages that might not have been divulged.

Clinton hasn't released information about her email server and its security features. Private email servers generally are not as reliable or secure as those used by the government or in commercial data centers.

Clinton aides and the State Department both say she never received or transmitted classified information on her private account.

Did she break the law?

That's to be determined. Her aides say no.

Her use of private email appears to conflict with the spirit of Barack Obama's pledge to make his presidency the most open ever. She stands out even in an administration that has been criticized as failing to live up to that promise.

However, Obama didn't sign a law requiring the archiving of officials' emails, including those on private accounts until November. Clinton left the State Department two years ago.

Even back when she was in office, according to the White House, it was administration policy for officials to conduct work on government email accounts. If their work strayed into personal emails, officials were responsible for making sure those messages were preserved for history.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest says the vast majority of administration staffers work on government accounts, which should assure their emails are preserved automatically.

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill says much of her messaging was email back and forth with her State Department advisers on their government email, so the correspondence was retained on their end. Still, her emails to or from people outside the U.S. government -- foreign officials, for example -- would not be captured in that way.

After the new law was signed last year, the State Department asked Clinton and other former secretaries of state for email records that should be preserved. That's when Clinton turned over the 55,000 pages.

Earnest said if Clinton did collect all of her personal email related to her official government work and turn it over, "that would be consistent with the Federal Records Act. And that's the president's expectation."

Yet only Clinton and her aides decided what to turn over.

Was State Department policy clear?

Clinton's office instructed State Department employees to avoid doing work by personal email.

A June 2011 cable to employees warned "online adversaries" were targeting personal accounts of department employees.

The department says those instructions concerned emails containing sensitive but unclassified information, such as personal information about employees or members of the public, business secrets or asylum applications.

The issue came up again in a 2012 inspector general's report.

The report said that reliance on "unauthorized information systems increases the risk for data loss, phishing and spoofing of email accounts," as well as the loss of public records. The report criticized Scott Gration, then ambassador to Kenya, for using an outside email system, among several other problems under his leadership. He resigned.

What's next?

The State Department will review the mountain of Clinton emails for possible public release and for security breaches. The process could take months, pushing the matter deeper into the 2016 presidential campaign. In a tweet this week, Clinton said she wanted the department to make her emails public as soon as possible.

Congressional Republicans will keep pressing for emails that might shed light on Benghazi or other controversies, with Clinton's potential presidential rivals surely paying rapt attention.

The State Department is under pressure to produce information under the nation's open-records law. It's juggling nearly 11,000 pending requests for various emails, including more than 75 requests for Clinton material filed from 2009 to 2013 by media organizations and others. Associated Press requests for Clinton emails and other documents have been delayed for more than a year; in one instance, four years.

What about potential foes' emails?

Jeb Bush, expected to seek the presidency on the Republican side, also used a personal email account -- jeb@jeb.org -- on a personal server, while he was Florida governor.

Florida's public records law is among the nation's strongest. Bush was required to turn over emails related to his work as governor from 1999 to 2007 to the state archives. Bush obtained those emails from the archivist and posted more than 275,000 online at jebemails.com last month.

In an example of how tricky public records issues can be, the vast email cache made public included some Floridians' birthdays and Social Security numbers. A spokeswoman said people's private information was removed from the website after it was discovered.

But like Clinton, Bush did not turn over what he determined to be personal messages on his account.

Democrats are raising the same questions about Bush that are being asked of Clinton: How can the public be sure that he turned over all relevant emails from his time in office?

Though Bush has taken a couple of swipes at Clinton over her emails, criticism from Republican presidential hopefuls has been muted so far, perhaps because it is a sensitive issue for several of them.

Email from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for example, has become part of criminal investigations.

Who has their own email server anyway?

Anybody could, but it's a pretty geeky pursuit.

A private server doesn't take a lot of room or a special power source. It could be the size of your desktop computer and sit unobtrusively in your home.

Some people set them up as a techy hobby. Others acquire them for privacy, because they don't trust corporate email providers to keep their messages out of the hands of hackers or government snoops.

Clinton might also have been worried about leaks. Now she says she wants her emails out there.