Contrary to 'Practice', Hillary Clinton Emailed Aide on Hotmail Account

    As pressure continues to mount on Hillary Clinton to answer more questions about her personal email, the former Secretary of State, while acknowledging some mistakes, is doubling down on some of the claims she has made since the story broke in March. One of these claims is that it was the Secretary's "practice to email government officials on their official .gov accounts so that her messages were preserved within email archives." This claim was made as recently as Tuesday on a new page on her website which was linked by an email sent to supporters Tuesday evening.
    However, a review of Mrs. Clinton's emails demonstrates that this was certainly not always the case. For instance, on October 9, 2010, a Saturday, Mrs. Clinton attempted to email Eric Woodard at the State Department, but used the wrong address. She then forwarded that email to her aide Lauren Jiloty to get the correct address. However, Mrs. Clinton did not use Jiloty's state.gov address that appears in many other emails, but rather Jiloty's hotmail address. Although Jiloty's address is redacted in the copy of the email released by the State Department, Jiloty herself identifies it as Hotmail [highlight added]:

    In the end, it was Jiloty and not Mrs. Clinton who copied a ".gov" account on her reply, contrary to the "practice" Mrs. Clinton says she followed.
    Ironically, Clinton's own website refutes the notion that Mrs. Clinton's email "messages were preserved within email archives" through her practice of emailing government official using their ".gov" accounts. A "Fact Sheet" from July that addressed the email problem says [emphasis added]:

On December 5, 2014, 30,490 copies of work or potentially work-related emails sent and received by Clinton from March 18, 2009, to February 1, 2013, were provided to the State Department. This totaled roughly 55,000 pages. More than 90% of her work or potentially work-related emails provided to the Department were already in the State Department's record-keeping system because those e-mails were sent to or received by "state.gov" accounts.

    Given that only 90% of the emails were already in the State Department system, this leaves 10%, or as many as 3,000, that were not. And yet Mrs. Clinton's latest defense leaves out this caveat, simply asserting "her messages were preserved within email archives," a claim that is demonstrably false.

Note: A version of this post first appeared at The Weekly Standard.