Hillary Clinton defended her use of a private email server for State Department correspondence, saying she used a system set up for her husband because it was convenient and “proved to be effective and secure.”
Addressing concerns about her emails publicly for the first time
on Tuesday, Clinton told a packed room of reporters at the United
Nations that she regrets conducting State Department business
from a personal email account, but welcomes the imminent
disclosure of the correspondence in question.
“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 persona
emails,” she said.
“Looking back it probably would have been smarter to use two
devices,” she added.
A scandal has erupted in recent days after it was revealed that
Clinton, while serving as secretary of state under Pres. Barack
Obama, conducted government business from a personal account that
was operated from servers registered to her family home in New
York state and first administered on behalf of her husband,
former President Bill Clinton.
The use of the previously secretive email account has since
raised questions from critics of Clinton about any correspondence
that may have been destroyed before being provided to the United
States government, per the Federal Records Act, as well as
security measures that may have protected those messages from
hackers, state-sponsored or otherwise.
“The system we used was set up for Pres. Clinton’s office and
it had numerous safeguards,” Clinton said on Tuesday.
“It was on property, guarded by the Secret Service and there
were no security breaches. So I think that the use of that server
which started with my husband certainly proved to be effective
and secure.”
All work-related emails from the account that were not personal
in nature have been handed off to the government to be published,
Clinton said, but private correspondence – messages about her
yoga routine, family vacations and “the other things you
typically find in inboxes” – have since been purged.
Around half of the 60,000 or so messages sent and received by
Clinton through the Clintonemail.com address were “not in any way
related” to official business, she said, but a subsequent search
uncovered roughly 55,000 printed pages worth of correspondence
that “could have possibly been work related.” But
Clinton said that because those emails were mostly sent to other
government officials, she ”knew that the State Department already
had the vast majority of them.”
“It is the government employee’s responsibility to determine
what is personal and what is work related,” Clinton said.
“I am very confident of the process that we conducted and the
emails that were produced, and I feel like once the American
public begins to see the emails they will have an unprecedented
insight into a high government official’s daily
communications.”
According to Clinton, no classified materials were sent through
her personal account. She expects the trove will become publicly
accessible in the near future.