&gt; One reason she might have wanted to setup her own private email server was to skirt FOIA requests<p>This is unlikely. It has to do with her addiction to Blackberry phones and the fact they were insecure. She refused to give up using it. The email server was hosted at home since her 2008 campaign.<p>I assume she just continued to use the server afterward.<p>She even contacted the NSA to find a solution to keep using her Blackberry but they couldn&#x27;t find one. It was just too insecure.<p>Edit: upon further investigation you might be right...<p>&gt; One year earlier, during her own presidential campaign, Clinton had said that if elected, “we will adopt a presumption of openness and Freedom of Information Act requests and urge agencies to release information quickly.”<p>&gt; But in those first few days, Clinton’s senior advisers were already taking steps that would help her circumvent those high-flown words, according to a chain of internal State Department emails released to Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit organization suing the government over Clinton’s emails.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;investigations&#x2F;how-clintons-email-scandal-took-root&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;ee301168-e162-11e5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;investigations&#x2F;how-clintons-e...</a>