Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to the reporters at United Nations headquarters, Tuesday, March 10, 2015. Clinton conceded that she should have used a government email to conduct business as secretary of state, saying her decision was simply a matter of “convenience.” AP
NEW YORK–Under fire for using private email while secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the likely next Democratic presidential nominee, said Tuesday she did so for “convenience” — but admitted this was probably a mistake.
Clinton insisted the private server that she used suffered no security breaches and that she discussed “no classified material” in the emails, while promising she had turned over all work communications to the State Department and wants to see them made public.
Of the 63,320 emails Clinton sent and received from March 2009 to her departure from State in February 2013, her office said 31,830 of them were personal, private records — such as those planning her daughter’s wedding, her mother’s funeral and “yoga routines” — and were deleted.
And, in a move not calculated to silence her critics, she said the Clinton family server on which all her emails were stored would not be turned over to the government.
Clinton said it had been “a matter of convenience” to use a personal email system on the job and insisted she had taken “unprecedented” steps to comply with the law requiring official records be kept.
“Looking back, it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two e-mail accounts,” Clinton told reporters after speaking at a United Nations women’s conference.
“I thought one device would be simpler, and obviously it hasn’t worked out that way.”
Some 21 months after she left office, following a State Department request to her and previous secretaries of state, Clinton turned over some 55,000 pages of emails.
“We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department,” she said.
But she offered no avenue for proving that potentially embarrassing work-related emails were not permanently deleted.
Asked directly if she or her team destroyed any work emails, she was unequivocal: “We did not.”
The former first lady and US senator has been accused, mainly by her Republican opponents, of trying to improperly keep her emails out of the public domain.
While Clinton apparently contravened State Department rules against conducting official business on personal email, she insisted her actions were legal.
The 20-minute appearance was her first before a swarm of reporters since the email revelations last week, and has been widely described as an effort for the famous Democrat to tamp down the uproar before she launches a run for the White House, perhaps as early as April.
But Republicans kept up the pressure, demanding the entirety of Clinton’s correspondence, reportedly from a clintonemail.com address, be considered for release.
Called to testify
“Secretary Clinton didn’t hand over her emails out of the goodness of her heart — she was forced to by smart, determined, and effective oversight by the House Select Committee on Benghazi,” House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman said, referring to the panel investigating the terror attacks in Libya in 2012 that killed four Americans.
The committee’s chairman, Trey Gowdy, smelled new blood, warning that Clinton’s comments provided more questions than answers.
“Without access to Secretary Clinton’s personal server, there is no way for the State Department to know it has acquired all documents that should be made public,” Gowdy said in a statement.
“I see no choice but for Secretary Clinton to turn her server over to a neutral, detached third-party arbiter who can determine which documents should be public and which should remain private.”
Gowdy also said he would urge Clinton to appear twice before his committee, first to “clear up her role and resolve issues surrounding her exclusive use of personal email,” and then in a public hearing on Benghazi.
Clinton had come under mounting pressure to address the issue, which Republicans have seized on as a sign Clinton may have sought to keep sensitive emails private despite her official communications being part of the public record.
The process of publicizing Clinton’s emails will take months, but State said Tuesday it would soon release a first batch of about 300.
“I’m very glad to hear (that), because I want it all out there,” Clinton said.
A potential Republican presidential rival, Jeb Bush, released 250,000 emails from 1999 to 2007, his time as governor of Florida.
The Democratic National Committee noted that Bush too used a private account on a private server.
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