Eric Bolling, co-host of Fox News' The Five, accused Hillary Clinton of “blusters” and “lying” for saying in her press conference that she was unable to securely access multiple email accounts on one mobile phone, opting instead to use her own email server instead of using two phones. But at the time, it was reportedly not possible to have two accounts on a secure BlackBerry like the one Clinton carreid.
During her press conference, Clinton said of her decision to use a personal email account for her government work when she became secretary of state:
I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.
Looking back, it would've been better if I'd simply used a second email account and carried a second phone, but at the time, this didn't seem like an issue.
After playing video of Clinton's comment, Bolling asked, “Are you kidding me? Any tenth grader could set up multiple email accounts on a single handheld device. Does she think the American people are that stupid?”
But as the technology blog Mashable reports, maintaining separate personal and government accounts on the same device is less secure, presenting a “real concern of attack vectors on the personal side.” Moreover, when Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, “there was no standard way to secure a BlackBerry like Clinton's with two email accounts, at least not without giving the IT person in charge complete dominion over all the data on the phone. To fulfill the criteria that Clinton demanded -- secure email that's not sitting on a cloud service, plus a single-BlackBerry solution -- she had just one option: Set up her own email server.”
The Washington Post similarly reports that “senior administration officials having two phones is still common to this day” due to security concerns. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote on Twitter that it was impossible to have two White House accounts on one phone “until maybe 2011-12.”
Bolling later claimed, “If you go to your iPhone, you can press a button that says 'add account' and you can have any one of six email servers ready to go, set up a new one.”
But that feature, called “unified inbox” was not available on iPhones in 2009 when Clinton became secretary of state. That was added in iOS 4, released in June of 2010.