As the political controversy over Hillary Clinton’s emails rumbles on, the former US Secretary of State on Tuesday confessed that it was a mistake to have used a private server during her tenure, at the same time defending her act of deleting personal emails.
In her first remarks over the email row, Hillary on Tuesday held a 20-minute presser where she revealed that she had exchanged 60,000 emails during her tenure as the Secretary of State.
Out of them, 30,490 emails were work-related which she made public to the State Department in December, two years after leaving office. But more than half of all her emails (over 32, 000) which she deleted were personal and involved correspondence related to her yoga routine, daughter’s wedding and her mother’s funeral and she said that she had deleted them.
“No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect privacy,” she said.
However, she defiantly rejected accusations that she created a security risk or violated the law.
“I fully complied with every rule I was governed by,” she said.
Clinton said repeatedly Tuesday that she had taken “unprecedented steps” to provide the State Department her work-related communications. She described the missing personal emails as ones she wrote about her daughter’s wedding, her mother’s funeral, her yoga routine and other similar matters.
Clinton left the Obama administration in early 2013, but didn’t turn over her written communications for nearly two years and only in response to a State Department request.
The email controversy stems from reports last week that Clinton had exclusively used both a private email address and a private server while at the State Department.
A central question for Clinton over the past week has been why she chose not to use government email if she wasn’t trying to skirt federal rules that require officials’ communications to be archived.
She described her use of personal email as a matter of “convenience” and a way to avoid carrying two devices. She said that didn’t appear to be an issue at the time, but that in hindsight, it would have been “smarter” to use a government account as well as her personal one.
