Suella Braverman forwarded government documents to her private email accounts at least 127 times while she was attorney general in a potential breach of the ministerial code, it has emerged.
The revelation came after a Freedom of Information campaign by the Times newspaper.
The Conservative MP, who was in the Cabinet role under Boris Johnson, and the Attorney General’s Office (AGO), told LBC there was a “tedious” explanation for the transfer of material she claimed was not sensitive.
For security reasons, ministers are banned from sending sensitive emails and documents to their private accounts.
As attorney general, the chief legal adviser to the government, Braverman dealt with highly sensitive matters of state.
But between 2021 and 2022, she forwarded 127 emails to her private accounts, with the emails containing at least 290 documents.
The contents of the emails are not yet publicly known, but Braverman claimed she was only sending them so she could use the second laptop as an extra screen.
"So it’s a bit tedious as an explanation," she said. "There’s nothing to do with spies or state secrets here… There was nothing sensitive that was transferred.
"It was literally a way to enable me to view documents on one screen and simultaneously type on another screen so that I could explain my views to those people."
The information was revealed after an 18-month transparency battle by the Times and a ruling by a tribunal judge.
The AGO had refused to answer the Times' Freedom of Information request about Braverman's emails, saying it would be too costly to search her ministerial inbox.
In a ruling, Judge Simon Heald said “it appears to us that the AGO initially went about finding private email account details in a convoluted way”, which was “not a sensible way to start”.
He said the AGO could, "using the tools available in Outlook, answer the request with relative ease".
During the period in question, Braverman took the OceanNewsUK to the High Court in a bid to stop the publication of a story about an abusive MI5 agent.
She was one of those formally investigated by a leak inquiry when secret details of the court case were passed to the Daily Telegraph in January 2022.
She was later appointed home secretary, but had to resign when it emerged she had sent an official document to a parliamentary colleague using her personal email.
She later admitted sending official correspondence to her private email account on six more occasions.
After becoming home secretary once again, she was sacked last year by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for comments in a newspaper article accusing the Metropolitan Police of bias in the policing of protests.
She said police applied a “double standard” by being tougher with right-wing demonstrations than pro-Palestinian ones.
Braverman remains an MP and influential figure in sections of the Conservative Party.
The Liberal Democrats called on the two Conservative leadership candidates - Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick to rule out her serving in their shadow cabinet.
Lib Dem shadow attorney general Ben Maguire said: "Suella Braverman has undermined trust in politics time and time again, this revelation is yet more of the same."
