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

New York: 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.