Hillary Clinton today admitted she had deleted as many as 31, 830 personal emails she sent as Secretary of State as she attempted to defend her ‘home brew’ private account.

The wannabe-Democratic president said at a press conference that she ‘did not choose to keep’ anything that was official government business after she was asked to hand over her records to the State Department.

She broke her silence after days of mounting questions over her email arrangements, which included keeping the messages on a private server at her home in New York that is protected by the Secret Service.

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton broke her silence on Tuesday after days of mounting questions over her email arrangements, which included keeping the messages on a private server at her home in New York

Asked why she only used one email address Clinton said: 'I saw it as a matter of convenience, it was allowed, others had done it'

But her 20-minute question and answer session was dismissed by senior Republicans, who said, they were 'left with more questions than answers.’

Clinton spoke at the United Nations in an attempt to head off commotion and admitted that she would have been ‘smarter’ to use an official email address.

She insisted that she streamlined her correspondence for 'convenience' and said that in hindsight she should have behaved differently.

The former Secretary of State, widely expected to announce her run for the White House within weeks, insisted every relevant email was now in the hands of the State Department.

But she did not say who on her team had decided which emails to send to the government and how such a decision had been reached.

Asked why she had deleted what she admitted was ‘half of her inbox’ she replied: ‘I fully complied with every government rule.’

She added: ‘They were personal and private, about matters I believe were in the scope of my personal privacy and that of other people. I did not see a reason to keep them.’

Mrs. Clinton said they included messages between her and her husband – who after his presidency set up the Clinton Foundation, which both lobbies the State Department and applies for funding from it – as well as messages ‘planning Chelsea’s wedding, my mother’s funeral’, ‘yoga routines’ and ‘family vacations’.

'No one wants their personal email made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy,' she said, explaining her decision to get rid of emails that weren't pertinent to her work at the State Department.

Clinton explained that she used a personal email address so that she didn't have to carry around two phones or devices.

'I saw it as a matter of convenience. It was allowed. Others had done it,' she said during the Tuesday afternoon press conference.

The former Obama administration official further contended that once the State Department releases her communications, it will become obvious to the public that they now have 'unprecedented' access to the communications of a top-ranking U.S. official.

'Looking back, it would have simply been better,' she said, to have used a State Department email, 'but at the time this just didn't seem like an issue.'

Repeating the State Department's previous claims, Clinton said the 'vast majority' of her government emails went to colleagues 'so they have already been captured.'

And when State came calling, asking for a full record of her correspondence, Clinton said, 'I responded right away, and provided all my emails' that could 'possibly be work-related.'

'I have no doubt that we've done exactly what we should have done,' she said of her actions, later stating that she feels she has 'went above and beyond' what State requested of her.

After Clinton's remarks, her team sent a document out to reporters revealing that during the span of her time in Obama's service, March 2009 to February 2013, Clinton sent and received 62,320 emails.

Of those, 30,490 were provided to the State Department, the nine-page 'statement from the Office of Former Secretary Clinton' said, and the remaining 31,830 were private, personal records.'

The document also claimed that usage of her personal email 'was widely known to the over 100 Department and U.S. government colleagues she emailed, as her address was visible on every email she sent.'

Additionally, it said that during the first few weeks after Clinton was confirmed as secretary of state she continued to use her Senate office email address, which she no longer has access to and therefore cannot mine for emails.

Her only contact via email with a foreign government, the statement said, was a U.K. official. The statement did not disclose that official's name.

The State Department confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that it has already released 300 Benghazi-related emails, comprising of 900 pages, to a special House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack.

Those emails, the department's top spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said will be made available online as soon as State finishes reviewing them. She did not provide a timeline for that action.

Psaki said all of Clinton's emails would eventually be released to the public in 'one batch...to ensure that standards are consistently applied throughout.'

'We said we expect the review to take several months. Obviously, that hasn’t changed. The release will be posted on a publicly available website. I will have more information about that hopefully soon,' Psaki told reporters.

Within an hour of her statement, Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which initially discovered her emails were private, told Daily Mail Online in an email Tuesday that after having heard directly from Clinton, his committee is still 'regrettably' left 'with more questions than answers.

The committee is now 'left with no choice' but to demand that she testify before Congress 'at least twice.' Once to make additional inquiries about her personal email system, and once to discuss the Benghazi attack itself.

Hillary Clinton is pictured here with husband Bill and daughter Chelsea during the Clinton Global Initiative's 10th Annual Meeting at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in September. Mrs. Clinton said today that among the messages she got rid of were some between her and her husband – who after his presidency set up the Clinton Foundation, which both lobbies the State Department and applies for funding from it

The South Carolina lawmaker said he sill wants to know who authorized Clinton to exclusively use a personal email address, how secure her server is, who had access to it when she was at State and 'who culled through the records to determine which were personal and which were public.'

'Without access to Secretary Clinton's personal server, there is no way for the State Department to know it has acquired all documents that should be made public, and given State's delay in disclosing the fact Secretary Clinton exclusively used personal email to conduct State business, there is no way to accept State's or Secretary Clinton's certification she has turned over all documents that rightfully belong to the American people,' he said.

'That is why I see no choice but for Secretary Clinton to turn her server over to a neutral, detached third-party arbiter who can determine which documents should be public and which should remain private.'

Gowdy asserted that, 'Secretary Clinton alone created this predicament.'

'But she alone does not get to determine its outcome,' he added.

The sentiment was echoed by a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, who later told reporters in an email that the GOP leader also believes that Clinton's news conference 'raised more questions than it answered.'

'Secretary Clinton didn’t hand over her emails out of the goodness of her heart – she was forced to by smart, determined, and effective oversight by the House Select Committee on Benghazi,' Boehner spokesman, Michael Steel said.

California Rep. Darrell Issa, who was until January the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said 'The expectation that we merely trust that Secretary Clinton shared all relevant e-mails and that the process of vetting the e-mails was as thorough and unbiased as it should have been is insulting given the Clintons’ well-established history of misleading the American people.'

'This matter cannot be put to rest without a thorough forensic examination of the email server and an unbiased independent review of the records in question,' he said.

The hard-charging Republican said the explanations Clinton gave at her press conference 'are not plausible' and chimed in on on his colleague's complaints that her appearance 'did little to answer the many legitimate questions about the mishandling of these emails.'

'That she is only now addressing this, years after the fact, seems to indicate her response has little to do with some sudden, revelatory desire for transparency.'

CONTROLLED: Clinton is pictured calling on reporters at her press conference. Her spokesman Nick Merrill attempted to keep the event from becoming a media feeding frenzy by pre-selecting which reporters Clinton should call on, but at the end the Q and A devolved into mutiny

The former secretary of state attempted to make peace with the public after a speech to the United Nations today on her work to expand opportunities for women across the globe.

Her previously scheduled remarks ended at roughly 2:15 pm EST, and the presser was to immediately follow. Clinton kept the press waiting in anticipation for nearly 45 minutes before she finally took the stage.

Then she began her press conference by marking the progress that women have made throughout the last 20 years and commenting on a letter 47 Republican senators sent Iranian leaders warning them that a nuclear deal negotiated with the Obama administration's would be nullified once the current occupant of the White House left Office.

Clinton said the letter is 'is out of step with the best traditions of American leadership, and one has to ask, what was the purpose of this letter.'

Clinton's only previous acknowledgement of the email controversy had been through a spokesman, Nick Merrill, and a single tweet, in which she called on the State Department to make public the messages her staff gave the government.

Clinton is escorted away from the microphones by the United Nations Deputy Chief of Protocol after her press conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The former Secretary of State, widely expected to announce her run for the White House within weeks, insisted every relevant email was now in the hands of the federal government

Clinton, a probable Democratic presidential candidate who's long led her competitors on the left and the right in the polls, has seen her popularity decline slightly since it became public knowledge that she exclusively used a private email system with a personalized domain name that was linked to secret server while she was at the State Department.

Both the White House and State Department have deflected questions on the matter and directed inquiries to Clinton and her team, who have said they provided copies of all her work-related emails to the federal government.

'When the Department asked former Secretaries last year for help ensuring their emails were in fact retained, we immediately said yes,' Merrill said in a statement last Tuesday.

'Both the letter and spirit of the rules permitted State Department officials to use non-government email, as long as appropriate records were preserved,' he said, and 'they in fact were, that is what happened here.'

Clinton's team sent 55,000 pages of correspondence to the government, and the former Obama administration official said last week on Twitter that she believes they should be made available to the public after the State Department finishes its review.

But that will take months, officials warn.

Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Gowdy and others tasked with investigating the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, don't believe Clinton turned over all her relevant emails even though her team says she did and have sent out a new round of subpoenas for her online communications.

Clinton is pictured here speaking during the Annual Women's Empowerment event at the United Nations in New York on Tuesday. Clinton's hotly anticipated press conference came roughly 45 minutes after her remarks and lasted about 20 minutes

Clinton joins her daughter and Clinton Foundation Vice Chair Chelsea Clinton for the official release of the No Ceilings Full Participation Report on Monday, which coincided with the start of the 59th session of the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women

Clinton smailes as she walks through the U.N. on her way to answer questions from reporters on Tuesday

And, as the Washington Examiner has reported, President Barack Obama failed to appoint an inspector general to oversee the State Department's activities and make sure it was acting appropriately during his first four and a half years in office.

He waited until after Clinton departed to fill the position.

'The White House is saying that the State Department has responsibility for making sure their officials and staff follow the law, but the White House is responsible for making sure they have the tools to do that and they fell down on that job in making sure they have the No. 1 tool, and that's an inspector general,' John Wonderlich, policy director at the government watchdog group the Sunlight Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.

Democrats had defended Clinton's innocence while urging her to confront the issue head on.

The longer she waits to respond to accusations of wrongdoing, they said, the guiltier she looks.

'She should come forward and explain the situation,' the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, said Tuesday morning on MSNBC.

'I'd like to hear her explanation of why she did it and what was covered by it,' he said. 'I think it's only fair to say to Hillary Clinton: "Tell us your side of the story." '

If Clinton implodes as the 2016 election cycle kicks off, Democrats worry their party's odds of retaining the presidency will go down right along with her.

According to The Guardian, Clinton is looking to launch her campaign on April 1, the first day of a new quarter of fundraising.

In making her candidacy official on that day, Clinton would be able to take full advantage of the fundraising quarter, giving her the highest numbers possible when she turns in her first campaign finance report - an important momentum building exercise.

Before the hotly anticipated press conference about her emails, Mrs. Clinton participated in a U.N. event and spoke about the global status of women. Her family foundation issued a report on the subject Monday.

Former South African Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, now at the helm of UN Women, introduced her along with other dignitaries.

Following the acknowledgment of a ‘president’ and a ‘prime minister,’ Mlambo-Ngcuka seemed to stumble on how to address Clinton.

When she settled on calling her a ‘future president,’ the chamber broke into applause.

Clinton smiled and acknowledged the cheers.

Later at her press conference, when asked by a reporter how the uproar over her email practices could affect her campaign launch, Clinton didn't directly speak about her candidacy while making it clear she thinks the ruckus won't have lasting effects on her political viability.

'I trust the American people to make their decisions about political and public matters, and I feel that I've taken unprecedented steps to provide these work-related email, ' she said. 'They're going to be in the public domain.'