Hillary Clinton's top aides used their personal email accounts to correspond with her about the attack in Benghazi while she was secretary of state, the New York Times reported Monday.
That detail comes after Clinton, earlier this month, held a news conference to address questions about her use of her personal email account to conduct official business while she was in office. During that event, she said "vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department."
Critics said the likely presidential contender's use of her personal email account may prevent official records from becoming public. Clinton's email was run from its own server out of her New York state home, and she has said that she deleted thousands of emails she deemed personal.
About 300 emails have been turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Benghazi attack, the New York Times reported. Some of those emails, according to people who saw them and described them to the Times, showed Clinton and her staff reacting as the Obama administration's explanation of what happened in Benghazi changed from a "spontaneous" attack — as then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice called it — to a planned act of terrorism.
Jake Sullivan, Clinton's foreign policy adviser, kept her updated on the developments, the Times reported:
Two weeks after that first email assessing Ms. Rice's appearance, Mr. Sullivan sent Mrs. Clinton a very different email. This time, he appeared to reassure the secretary of state that she had avoided the problems Ms. Rice was confronting. He told Mrs. Clinton that he had reviewed her public remarks since the attack and that she had avoided the language that had landed Ms. Rice in trouble.
"You never said 'spontaneous' or characterized their motivations," Mr. Sullivan wrote.