Breaking her silence on the controversy over use of her private email account for all official work during her four-year stint as America’s top diplomat, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that she did so as a matter of “convenience” and that she violated no rules. But her remarks during a brief media interaction, notably the revelation that she deleted roughly half of the emails that were purely personal while turning over the rest to the State Department, prompted her Republican critics to argue that her explanations have only raised more questions.
Clinton, the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, also made it clear that her family’s server would remain private, ignoring suggestions that it be turned over to an independent arbiter. She also asserted that she did not send any classified material to anybody by email. “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,” Clinton said during her media stake-out at the UN headquarters in New York on Tuesday, adding ruefully: “looking back, it would have been better if I had simply used a second email account and carried a second phone.”
Elaborating on the numbers, Clinton’s office said later that between March 2009 and early 2013, she sent and received 62,320 emails from her private account, of which 31,830 were personal in nature. The Clinton office also said that her use of the private email account was “widely known” among more than 100 US Government colleagues with whom she communicated.
last December, Clinton, at the request of the State Department to her as well as previous Secretaries of State, turned over all the emails deemed to be official, running into about 55,000 printed pages. Clinton said she has requested the department to make these mails public after their review. Clinton’s public explanation of her position came after more than a week of news reports and TV debates that were largely critical of her style of functioning. Republicans have been in the forefront of the criticism of Clinton for her ethics and transparency.