Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served as the 67th United States Secretary of State, under President Barack Obama, from 2009 to 2013, overseeing the department that conducted the Foreign policy of Barack Obama. She was preceded in office by Condoleezza Rice, and succeeded by John Kerry. She is also the only former First Lady of the United States to become a member of the United States Cabinet. Within a week after the November 4, 2008, presidential election, President-elect Obama and Clinton discussed over telephone the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his
Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State or slightly less than half, of the 62,320 emails that Clinton had sent or received on her private email account during her time as secretary. At a press conference Clinton said she had set up the separate server as a matter of convenience so that she could carry one device and not two, but that in retrospect "it would have been better if I'd simply used a second email account and carried a second phone". She said that she had sent mails to State Department employees on their government accounts, ensuring such mails would be preserved, but it then turned