Broke no rules, mailed no classified info to anyone: Clinton

Breaking her silence over the email uproar, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said she chose one account for both her personal and official communication out of "convenience" but acknowledged it would have been better if she had used government email for work.

"Looking back, it would've been better if I'd simply used a second email account and carried a second phone, but at the time, this didn't seem like an issue," she told reporters here yesterday in her first press conference over the issue.

Clinton, however claimed she "did not break" any rules by using the single email account and that no classified information was sent on her email.

"I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by," she said. "I did not email any classified material to anyone."

"The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department," she added.

Clinton, 67, who was at the UN headquarters to deliver a keynote address at a women's empowerment conference, said in the hindsight she felt it would have been better had she used two email accounts.

"When I got to work as Secretary of State, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account which was allowed by the State Department because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two," she said.

"I thought using one device would be simpler and obviously it hasn't worked out that way," Clinton, a top potential Democratic contender for the 2016 elections, said.

She also claimed that she took the "unprecedented step" of asking the State Department to make all her work related emails public for everyone to see.

The controversy over her use of private email address for the four years when she was the Secretary of State, broke out last week after media reports said she had used a domain name to create the email account on January 13, 2009, the same day she began the confirmation process in the Senate.

All US State Department officials are required to use a "state.gov" email address for all official communications.

Clinton said that a vast majority of her work emails went to government employees at their government addresses.

"I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work related, which totalled roughly 55,000 printed pages even though I knew that the state department already had the vast majority of them," she said.

"The 55,000 pages of correspondence made up about half, or 30,000, of the overall 60,000 emails she had sent and received with the private server, which was set up for her husband and former President Bill Clinton's office and has numerous safeguards," Clinton said.

"We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department,” she said.

Clinton said she chose in the end "not to keep" her private personal emails, including those related to planning her daughter Chelsea's wedding, her mother's funeral arrangements, condolences notes to friends, yoga as well other routine things.
"No one wants their personal emails made public," she said clarifying, why she deleted some of her personal emails.

"They were personal and private about matters that I believed were within the scope of my personal privacy and particularly that of other people," she said.

On whether the controversy would have an impact on her decision to run for the office of the US President, she said "I trust the American people to make their decisions about political and public matters and I feel that I've taken unprecedented steps to provide these work-related emails, they are going to be in the public domain," she said.

The White House yesterday said that President Barack Obama exchanged emails with Clinton on her private email address while she was the Secretary of State, but only recently learned the details of the personal email server she was operating.

However, Clinton's breaking her silence on the email controversy, ever since it was reported by The New York Times, did not find much taker in the opposition Republican camp, who appeared to be unconvinced by her clarifications on this issue.

"Clinton's press conference today (Tuesday) only raises more questions about her tenure at the State Department and she must be more forthcoming with the American people in the days ahead because it does matter," Rick Santorum, a Republican presidential aspirant said soon after Clinton's televised news conference from outside the Security Council of the UN here.