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Laws and regulations did not prohibit employees from using their personal email accounts for the conduct of official Department business.

—Report by the State Department Inspector General, May 2016

Sounds definitive, right? Every department in the federal government has an internal Inspector General who oversees legal and regulatory compliance. The State Department Inspector General and his top aides, one of whom had formerly worked for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, were no friends of mine. They looked for every opportunity to be critical. Yet when they examined all the rules in place when I was Secretary of State, they came to the above conclusion. There was a lot of confusion and consternation in the press about this question—in part because some of the rules changed after I left office. But as the Inspector General of the State Department spokesman confirmed: there was no prohibition on using personal email.

Prior to Secretary Kerry, no Secretary of State used a state.gov email address.

—Karin Lang, the career diplomat responsible for managing the staff supporting the Secretary of State, in a June 2016 deposition

The use of private email didn’t start with me. It also didn’t end with me. Colin Powell exclusively used an AOL account. Secretary Kerry, who was the first Secretary of State to use a government email address, has said that he continued using his preexisting personal email for official business well into 2015. None of this was particularly remarkable. Nor was it a secret. I corresponded with more than a hundred government officials from my personal email account, including the President and other White House officials. The IT staff at the State Department often assisted me in using my BlackBerry, particularly when they realized how technologically challenged I was.

As for record keeping, because the overwhelming number of people with whom I was exchanging work-related emails were government personnel on their “.gov” email addresses, I had every reason to think the messages I sent should have been captured by the government’s servers, archived, and made available for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked.

—FBI Director Jim Comey, in a press conference on July 5, 2016

A lot of people suggested that the server maintained by my husband’s office might be vulnerable to hacking. As it turned out, the State Department network and many other highly sensitive government systems, including at the White House and the Pentagon, were all hacked. Colin Powell’s emails were hacked. But, as Comey stated, there has never been any evidence that my system was ever compromised. Ironically, it turns out it may have been one of the safest possible places for my email.