It was revealed that the former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton used a personal e-mail account during her tenure. It was also reported that from August, the White House and the State Department knew of her not using the government e-mail.
In reaction to the news, President Barack Obama said, he had learn about the e-mail from the news report. In an interview the President said, “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports”.
The president also stands by his claims by saying, “The policy of my administration is to encourage transparency… and that’s why my emails — the BlackBerry that I carry around — all those records are available and archived and I’m glad that Hillary has instructed that those emails that had to do with official business need to be disclosed”.
It was previously reported that, Clinton`s staff had decided to keep the news quite, when in August the White House and State Department learned that the Republican knew about the information of Clinton using a private e-mail to conduct her official government business.
President Obama defended his former Secretary of State, when he said, “Let me just say that Hillary Clinton is and has been an outstanding public servant; she was a great secretary of state for me”. The State Department said, they became aware of the situation when they prepared a batch of 15,000 emails requested by the house Republicans for the Benghazi investigation.
In a statement Jamal Ware, spokesman for the Republican-led Select Committee on Benghazi, confirmed that, he noticed Mrs. Clinton was included on messages at the address “[email protected]” when going through the State Department documents in “late summer,” and then more on documents in February.
It was also reported that, just before the scandal broke out, the committee, Chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., asked for all of Clinton’s emails relating to Benghazi. They also asked the state department to include any communications from her personal email and server, as well as texts, attachments and pictures to make available to them.
After receiving a lot of criticism over the security of the e-mails, Hilary Clinton asked the State Department to release all the emails during her time as Secretary of State. The State department officials said it will take time to review all the documents. The officials said, “The review is likely to take several months given the sheer volume of the document set”.