PHILADELPHIA — Pennsylvania’s embattled attorney general has routinely used personal e-mail accounts to conduct official business, transmitting confidential information and the identities of undercover agents, despite an office ban that says doing so risks security.

Kathleen Kane sent or received nearly 4,000 work-related e-mails through AOL and Yahoo accounts from the time she took office in January 2013 through August 2015, according to records obtained by The Associated Press.

The attorney general’s office released copies of two-thirds of those e-mails under the state’s open records law, but it deemed almost one-third exempt from disclosure, mostly on the grounds they contained sensitive or confidential material.

Among the subjects covered in the 1,144 unreleased e-mails, Kane’s office said: personal medical and mental health; workplace discrimination, sexual harassment and employee discipline; secret grand jury and attorney-client communications; and information that could identify agents “performing an undercover or covert law enforcement activity.”

A previous attorney general established a policy in 2009 that deemed using private e-mail for office work a fireable offense.

Kane is responsible for setting office policy and had the authority to exempt herself from those rules, spokesman Chuck Ardo said. Kane said last week she didn’t know her office had such a policy until the AP asked about it, though she at least once told senior staffers they shouldn’t use personal e-mail.

Kane’s spokesman said the attorney general is always on call and sometimes uses the personal accounts “to expedite matters.”

The practice continues, Ardo said.

“Given her authority to choose to use her private e-mail account, no one has attempted to dissuade her from doing so,” he said.

The 2009 policy barring use of personal e-mail is 18 pages long, states that it is critical to transmit confidential information over a secure network and warns that access to such information could cause “severe damage” to the attorney general’s office.