Hillary apologises for using personal email
What you need to know:
- 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.
- “Looking back, it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two e-mail accounts,” Mrs Clinton told reporters after speaking at a United Nations women’s conference.
NEW YORK, Wednesday
Under fire for using private email while secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the likely next Democratic presidential nominee, said yesterday she did so for “convenience” — but admitted this was probably a mistake.
Mrs 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.
Mrs 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
“Looking back, it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two e-mail accounts,” Mrs 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 Mrs 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. (AFP)
