Hillary Clinton: 'I want the public to see my email'

Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of a self-hosted email address has been at the center of controversy over the last few days, and now the former Secretary of State tweets that she wants those emails -- or at least the 55,000 pages she has shared with the State Department -- released to the public. Her tweets came after a congressional committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya, issued a subpoena "for all communications of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton related to Libya and to the State Department." A New York Times article closely accompanying the tweet (it actually went up several minutes before, but somehow quoted the tweet) fills in some of the holes of the story about how her account worked, referring to it as a "mark of status within the family's inner circle."

[Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images]

The former first lady and Secretary of State is preparing for a presidential campaign in 2016, and now her use of a privately-controlled email address is an issue for reasons of transparency, and as it relates to the still-under-investigation terrorist attack. The State Department responded to her request, saying that it will "review for public release the emails provided by Secretary Clinton to the Department" but that it could take some time to complete. The clintonemail.com domain name was registered by an aide back in the 90s, and eventually connected to a server registered by another former aide, Eric Hothem.

It remains to be seen whether this step will satisfy the critics, who wonder what process was used to determine which emails she and her advisers would hand over to the Department, and whether there will be any independent review of other messages. Possible rival candidate Jeb Bush recently posted archives from the email used during his time as the governor of Florida, leaking some citizen's private data in the process. Among many questions is whether her use of a personal address violated National Archives and Records Administration requirements that all work email be preserved in the appropriate record-keeping system.