Hillary Clinton email scandal does damage control | CNN Politics

Hillary Clinton's email troubles

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Former secretary of State and likely 2016 White House aspirant Hillary Clinton sought to tamp down concerns about her use of private email while leading the State Department during a press conference at the United Nations on Tuesday. While she maintained she had not broken any rules, she also said she would not be turning over the private server housing her correspondence, despite calls for her to release it for an independent review.

Clinton said she used a private domain for her official work during her time at the State Department out of “convenience,” but admitted in retrospect “it would have been better” to use multiple emails.

“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. “Looking back, it would have 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.”

READ: Did she do anything wrong or not?

The former secretary of state defended her process in choosing which emails to turn over to the State Department, telling reporters that she and her staff “err[ed] on the side of providing anything that could be possibly viewed as work-related.”

A statement from her office outlined the process by which she chose which emails to turn over, revealing it included a search for the names of State Department staffers, anything from a “.gov” email address and various keyword searches of the emails sent and received during her time at the State Department.

“I trust the American people to make their decisions about political and public matters and I feel like I’ve taken unprecedented steps for these emails to be in the public domain,” Clinton said. “I went above and beyond what I was requested to do.”

But that reassurance will likely fall short for critics who point out there’s no way of verifying her team turned over all government-related emails no matter how politically damaging they may be.

In the 20-minute press conference, Clinton answered an array of questions raised by the revelation that she exclusively used a private server and domain for her official business during her time at state. And in a sign of how much the Clinton team wants to nip the controversy in the bud, they issued a detailed, nine-page memo outlining answers to a series of common questions surrounding the controversy.

During her press conference, Clinton said that the 55,000 pages of correspondence she turned over to the State Department for review made up about half, or 30,000, of the overall 60,000 emails she sent and received with the private server. The statement later disclosed that about 90% of those had already been archived in the State Department’s records, as they had been sent to “.gov” accounts, which are automatically archived.

The other 30,000 — which included everything from wedding planning to yoga routines, Clinton said — she deleted.