Hillary Rodham Clinton admitted in a news conference Tuesday that it was a mistake to use a personal email account to conduct State Department business, but denied any wrongdoing even as she acknowledged that she no longer has thousands of emails she deemed private.

“It would have been better had I used a second email account,” Clinton said, saying she had decided in 2008 before becoming secretary of state to use only one account “for convenience.” “Looking back, it would have been smarter to use two devices,” she said, insisting that she had sent all “work-related” emails to the State Department and hailing the department’s decision, announced Tuesday, to make them available online.


At the same time, Clinton said she believed she had complied with State Department rules at the time and had not been under any obligation to use an official government email account.

“I believe I have met all of my responsibilities. The server will remain private,” Clinton said.

But Clinton vociferously defended her decision not to share personal details of her life, such as wedding planning, yoga lessons and decisions about her mother’s funeral. “In the end, I decided not to keep my private emails,” Clinton said.

Asked whether she had been briefed on security concerns about her email setup, Clinton refused to answer directly, but volunteered that she had sent no classified emails and that there had been no security breeches of her private server.

Throughout the brief question-and-answer session at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, Clinton repeatedly deflected another key question asked by several reporters: Just how, and in what way, might this episode affect her plans to run for president in 2016.

Clinton was responding to reports last week that she relied exclusively on a private email address during her four years as secretary of state, rather than an official account where the messages would likely have become part of her agency’s historical records. The Associated Press later reported that the emails were channeled through a private server registered to her suburban New York residence, to channel her messages.

Meanwhile, the White House acknowledged Monday that President Barack Obama traded emails with Clinton on her private account but was said he unaware how the account was set up or that messages were not being saved in a federal archive.

“The president, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his secretary of state,” said press secretary Josh Earnest. “I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email each other.”

Obama told CBS in an interview Saturday that he’d learned of Clinton’s use of a private e-mail address and server “through news reports.” However, Earnest conceded Monday that Obama knew Clinton was communicating from a private e-mail account, but was unaware of how that mail was handled or that Clinton did not have an official “state.gov” account.

“Yes, the president was aware of her email address,” Earnest said. “He was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.”

The pressure on Clinton has ratcheted up as critics, including some congressional Democrats, have called on her to publicly address the reports.

In December, Clinton sent 50,000 pages of emails from the private account to the State Department at its request. The agency recently turned over 900 pages of emails from Clinton’s account to a House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks in 2012.

But critics have argued that Clinton’s handling of the issue as left her and her staff totally in control of screening emails and deciding which ones are responsive to government requests.

Both the White House and the State Department brushed aside suggestions from that panel’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), that his panel may not have received all Libya-related emails. Gowdy said Clinton produced no emails from a time period when she traveled to Libya and was photographed using her BlackBerry.

“Maybe she was using her BlackBerry to read the news,” Earnest said. “You can use your Blackberry for other things other than email, right?”

State spokeswoman Jen Psaki took a similar tack, arguing that there was nothing suspicious about any gaps in the e-mail record.

“I wasn’t on that trip [but] I’ve been on trips with the current secretary where there are communications issues, where you really don’t send emails,” the spokeswoman said.

Earnest also said the White House had allowed the State Department to manage its own response to the latest House Benghazi inquiry.

“I would hazard a guess that if the White House were intimately involved in that kind of effort to review email and make determinations about what should be provided to Congress that [Gowdy would] be complaining about that on national television as well,” the press secretary added.

The White House suggested Monday that concerns were misplaced about the process Clinton used to produce her emails after the State Department requested them in October.

But Earnest did not come down squarely for or against proposals that a neutral party verify that all work-related e-mails have been produced. Clinton allies suggested Sunday that she would be open to such a review.

“I haven’t heard anybody or seen anybody present any evidence to indicate that [Clinton’s aides] didn’t do what they said they did,” Earnest declared. “If Secretary Clinton’s team decides that they want to go to greater lengths than they already have that ultimately is a decision for them to make.”

The fact that Obama corresponded with Clinton via a private server stoked fears that the arrangement increased the risks that either of them could have been hacked or that messages between them could have been intercepted more readily than communications between two “.gov” email accounts.

However, cybersecurity experts said that was not necessarily the case, since communications between government e-mail servers handling unclassified information are not always encrypted or directly connected.

“There is no top-level, [Office of Management and Budget]-driven, thou-shalt-run a common-network-with-a-common-backbone, which is what we were trying to get years ago, but could just never do it,” said one expert who worked on cybersecurity issues in the George W. Bush White House and asked not to be named. E-mails “could go directly from one to another, but that depends on those two [agencies’ technology leaders’] getting together and engineering some kind of cross-connect.”

The former official said that proposals over the last decade to create a government-only network went by the wayside.

“The grand idea of connecting the entire federal government on fiber that’s only for the government – that’s about as practical as building a highway system that’s just for the government. Way too expensive to install, maintain and operate. So then you fall back on, okay, we’ll use commercial fiber,” the official said.

The White House declined to comment Monday on whether Obama’s communication with Clinton through her private address posed any security risks or if those risks had been mitigated in some fashion.

“One of the security precautions we take around the president’s email is we don’t talk about it very [much] publicly,” Earnest said, while acknowledging that policy had been breached somewhat in recent days.

At the State Department, Psaki said there was no indication that the content of Clinton’s e-mail account was compromised, although she changed her address in 2011 after a hacker obtained it and posted it online.

”We don’t have any reason to believe that” outsiders gained access to her account,” the spokeswoman said. “Obviously her email wasn’t hacked.”

Clinton’s expected effort to tackle questions at a press conference about her e-mail use poses risks for the former secretary, who is expected to officially announce her 2016 campaign for the White House in the next month or so. For one, she is out of practice — and hasn’t interacted much with the press since she left the State Department in 2013.

One person close to the Clintons told POLITICO that whatever she says “you guys are going to just say it raises more questions than it answers” — but the person added, “it’s something she needs to do.”

On March 4, Clinton announced on Twitter that she would turn over emails to the State Department for vetting and eventual public release. “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible,” she tweeted at the time.

Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton attended a Clinton Foundation event in New York Monday, but did not respond to reporters’ questions about the emails. A spokesman for Hillary Clinton did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this story.

David Perera and Gabriel Debenedetti contributed reporting to this story.

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