Senior State Department official says staff's private email servers "not acceptable"

A senior official with the U.S. Department of State said Wednesday it is "not acceptable" for any staff to conduct official business via private email account as presidential contender Hillary Clinton did during her tenure as head of the department.

While acknowledging her ignorance of Clinton's use of a personal email server to store all her State Department emails sent from a personal account, Joyce Barr, Assistant Secretary for Administration, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that her department has now made it clear to all staff that such a practice is unacceptable.

"I think that the action we've taken in the course of recovering these emails have made it very clear what people's responsibilities are with respect to record-keeping," said Barr during her hearing. "The message is loud and clear that that is not acceptable."

State Department officials earlier in March admitted to reporters that the email traffic of other senior State Department officials was not automatically or routinely archived till February.

The lax record-keeping practice raises possibilities that many emails have already been destroyed unless individual officials had saved their emails regularly.

Clinton is expected to testify later this month before a special House panel investigating the deadly 2012 attacks on the U. S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, and to answer questions about her personal email account and server.

The chairman of the panel Trey Gowdy had earlier requested Clinton to testify twice, one in public on the Benghazi embassy attacks, and another private hearing solely on her exclusive use of a private email account and server. Clinton agreed to testify before the panel but said she would only do it once.

Clinton has already publicly testified once before the House panel on the Benghazi incident. The revelation that she was using a private email account and server, however, breaths new life into the panel's inquiry, as House Republicans question whether Clinton has handed in all Benghazi-related emails.

During the Benghazi incident, four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, were killed.

The State Department last October asked four former secretaries of state to hand in all official records, including emails, and Clinton in December turned more than 55,000 pages of emails sent on her private account. In a press conference in March, Clinton explained she "opted for convenience" to use her personal email account. Endite