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Hillary Clinton answers questions at the United Nations in New York yesterday. Ms Clinton admitted she made a mistake in choosing not to use an official email account when she was US secretary of state. Photograph: Don Emmertdon Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Ms Clinton told a press conference at the United Nations she opted, for convenience, to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the state department to carry only one mobile device. Looking back it would have been better to use two separate phones and two separate email accounts.

Ms Clinton said all her work-related emails would be released to the public, adding that the publication would give unprecedented insight into a high government officials daily communications, which I think will be quite interesting.

Minutes before Ms Clintons remarks, US state department officials told reporters emails sent by Ms Clinton would be posted to a website after a set given to them by her inner circle had been reviewed. However, the officials said the process would take several months.

About 300 redacted emails relating to the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic station in Benghazi, Libya, are reportedly to be the first selection posted. The state department did not specify what proportion of Ms Clintons archive would be published.

We will review the entire 55,000-page set and release in one batch at the end of that review to make sure that standards are consistently applied, Jen Psaki, the state department spokeswoman, told a briefing in Washington.

Until yesterday, her response had been limited to a single tweet, which left questions unanswered. I want the public to see my email, Ms Clinton posted last week. I asked state to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.

Data experts have questioned the security of her private email setup, which was detached from government servers. Republicans in Congress, journalists and transparency advocates are demanding all messages relating to her work as Americas most senior diplomat be disclosed in response to ongoing inquiries in Washington and public records requests.

Officials previously said Ms Clintons team produced more than 55,000 pages of relevant emails. But it remains unclear how many messages, if any, have been held back.

Barack Obama and his advisers have sought to distance themselves from the controversy. Stressing that his own emails comply with all demands under presidential records laws, Mr Obamas advisers have argued Ms Clintons camp is responsible.

Excerpt from:
Hillary Clinton admits official email use would be better

"I opted for convenience."

That was the basic message that came out of Hillary Rodham Clinton's press conference Tuesday afternoon at the United Nations, the first time other than one brief tweet that the former secretary of State has directly addressed concerns that she used a private e-mail account and server for her official work while she was in office.

"Looking back, it would have been better if I had simply used a second e-mail account and carried a second phone" for private correspondence, Mrs. Clinton said at the conference. But at the time, she said, "I thought it would be easier to carry one device."

The press conference came a week after news about Clinton's private e-mail use broke, during which Clinton has been under increased pressure to answer questions about it. Even supporters, like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D) of California, were publicly encouraging her to speak, lest her silence prove too damaging.

Clinton seemed to be trying to wait it out, as she has successfully done with other scandals, but the questions and conspiracy theories from her opposition continued to grow.

On Tuesday, she emphasized repeatedly that she broke no rules. When she was in office, there was no prohibition on government officials using private e-mail accounts for official business (a policy that since has been updated). Other secretaries of State, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, also used personal e-mails for State Department business, though not as exclusively as Clinton did.

She also discounted suggestions that the 55,000 pages of e-mails she provided to the State Department which the Department has said it will be making public on a website once it has reviewed them didn't include all her official e-mails.

Clinton says that she had a thorough review done of her e-mails, and about half were work-related, while the other half "were not in any way related to my work," and included things like correspondence about her daughter's wedding and condolence notes to friends. She said most of her work-related e-mails went to officials at their government email address, and so were automatically recorded. Her direction was to "err on the side of providing anything that could possibly be viewed as work-related" to the State Department, she said.

But that statement essentially telling the American public to trust her may be hard for some of her critics to swallow.

"If theres one thing skeptics arent going to do its taking Hillary Clintons word for something," says Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College in California.

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Hillary Clinton: private e-mail was 'for convenience'

Hillary Rodham Clinton insisted Tuesday that she had broken no rules by using a private email account to conduct government business as secretary of State, even as she disclosed that her aides had deleted more than 30,000 emails that she deemed personal.

While she sought to quell a controversy that threatens to mar the debut of her expected presidential candidacy, Clinton may have only fueled it with a 20-minute news conference her first in two years that raised fresh questions about her actions.

Insisting that her approach was fully consistent with administration rules, she said she would not allow investigators from Congress to examine the private computer server that processed and stored the emails at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

The former senator from New York said the server had been installed to ensure digital security for her husband, former President Clinton. She said it was still guarded by the Secret Service and had never been hacked.

Nonetheless, she said that last fall she approved the destruction of slightly more than half of the emails she wrote or received as Americas top diplomat during President Obamas first term because they were private and personal. The remainder were forwarded to the State Department.

No one wants their personal emails made public, Clinton told reporters who packed a hallway outside the United Nations Security Council after she had delivered a speech at a conference on empowering women. Two dozen TV crews ensured her comments ran live on several networks.

Clinton said the deleted messages included private emails with her husband, or involved personal matters like her yoga classes or planning for the 2010 wedding of their daughter, Chelsea, or the 2011 funeral of her mother, Dorothy Rodham.

So far, polls indicate the controversy has done little to shake the former first ladys standing among Democratic voters, who overwhelmingly support her all-but-announced bid for the White House.

Many were quick to dismiss the criticism as a stew of partisan smear and media hype, even as critics delighted in reviving her familys mine-strewn political history and her penchant for secrecy and hunkering down.

Yet her comparatively laggard reaction to the storm, allowing more than a week to pass before she offered a substantive response, contributed to concerns among Democratic Party professionals that her political operation had gone rusty or was maladapted to the 24/7 demands of todays campaign world.

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Hillary Clinton tries to end controversy over private email account

The former secretary of state and presumed Democratic frontrunner has come under fire for her use of personal email at the State Department. She addressed the controversy head-on for the first time on Tuesday, insisting she didn't break any rules and that she's taken every necessary step to ensure the public has access to her work emails.

Frustration has been building for days among some of Clinton's deep-pocketed supporters over what they perceive to be a scandal hyped up by Republicans -- as well as the press. In a sign of Clinton's strong ties with the Democratic elite and her dominance in the Democratic field as she heads into 2016, her top donors and supporters are coming out to publicly defend the former secretary of state as well as her team's handling of the issue.

There is no "scandal," said Alan Patricof, founder of the venture capital firm Greycroft and a Clinton friend and donor.

"I don't perceive any concern among the donor community who recognize that this is just one of many issues that gets blown out of proportion when it relates to a Clinton," Patricof told CNN. "This will all pass when it is realized it is just a tempest in a teapot."

READ: Did she do anything wrong or not?

But one well-connected private sector observer based in New York said some donors are "very worried" about just how long the email scandal will haunt Clinton.

"It is a huge distraction and will take a long time to resolve," the person said. The main concern among top allies, they added, is that the issue "will be unresolved story for months."

Former Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard, who served on Clinton's finance committee in 2008 and has publicly vowed to donate to Clinton's next campaign, suggested that the press has played no small role in hyping up the controversy.

"The upcoming campaign will have to focus on jobs, economic growth and quality of life," Blanchard said. "And, of course, the opposition needs to be the right wing (Republicans), not the press."

Taking questions at the United Nations on Tuesday, Cilnton explained that during her time at the State Department, she chose to use her personal email account rather than her government address for the sake of "convenience."

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Hillary Clinton donors frustrated by email controversy

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted Tuesday that she discarded tens of thousands of emails from a private server kept at her New York home.

In her first extended public remarks about her exclusive use of a personal email account to conduct government business, Clinton was adamant that she complied with all applicable rules and said she went above and beyond by handing over some 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department.

But her admission that she did not turn over roughly half the messages in her private account and will not submit them to independent scrutiny will likely fan the controversy.

At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emailsemails about planning Chelseas wedding or my mothers funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes, Clinton said, saying attorneys she paid categorized the correspondence.

They were personal and private, she added. They had nothing to do with work. I didnt see any reason to keep them.

Under fire from pundits and political critics, Clinton called the unusual press conferencethe most significant since she left officeto defend herself.

The former Secretary of State said that when she began the job, she made the decision to use her private address as a matter of convenience. She noted the vast majority of her work emails were sent to government employees on their official work accounts, and as a result, those messages are preserved and archived as public records on the other end.

I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and personal emails instead of two, she said. Looking back, she added, it might have been smarter to have two devices from the very beginning.

Read more: Transcript of Hillary Clintons remarks at the press conference

The State Department said Tuesday that it is reviewing by hand 55,000 pages of emails supplied by Clinton. The Department will release emails from that cache on a publicly accessible website once it redacts information not covered by the Freedom of Information Act. The process is expected to take several months.

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Hillary Clinton Did Not Keep Personal Emails