Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made it official: She will run for president in the 2016 race.

Mitt Romney said on Fox News Sunday April 12, that Clinton "erased all of her emails even though they were subject to recall and review by Congress." Romney got it wrong when he spoke of all of her emails. Romney's words about recall and review by Congress are ambiguous. In terms of preserving records, legal experts agree that Congress has no direct role - it's up to the executive branch. And a legal expert told us Clinton responded to congressional subpoenas, and there is no proof she destroyed evidence subject to review.

In March, the public learned that instead of using a State Department email account when she was in charge, Clinton ran her email through a private server in her New York home. When State officials asked for copies of her government-related emails last year, Clinton's staff went through her files and sent about 30,000. According to Clinton, about an equal number of emails were personal and were erased. Clinton has said that all this was in line with federal regulations. Politifact has found that it isn't so cut and dried. The National Archives and Records Administration oversees federal records, and its code requires federal agencies to keep records that document agency activity so that they are readily available when needed - such as for Freedom of Information Act requests or congressional inquiries. However, not all records need be retained. Agencies may delete material deemed to have no value.

The laws are tighter today than when Clinton was secretary, but even during her tenure, her reliance on a private email account skirted the law, experts say. "The key thing is that though use of a personal account was not prohibited, exclusive use of it was," said Daniel Metcalfe, law professor at American University and former director of the Department of Justice's Office of Information Policy. With a State Department email account, all of Clinton's emails would have been stored on a government computer. Any researcher or government body would then have access. (That said, the department preserves relatively few emails.) Clinton's private email account changed the process completely. She, not a government worker, had control over the emails, and even though emails she sent to government workers would have been saved under their accounts, searching those records would be more complicated.

Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker, Biddle, and Reath and former director of litigation at the National Archives, said Clinton's actions were inconsistent with the spirit if not the letter of the Federal Records Act. Douglas Cox, a law professor in government records law at the City University of New York, Cox shares that view: "But the problem is that not all of her emails were 'subject to recall and review by Congress.' There is plenty of justifiable criticism for Clinton's actions, but that does not appear to be one of them."

Chip Tuthill lives in Mancos. Websites used: www.politifact.com.