A cocky Hillary Clinton on Tuesday shrugged off the questions swirling around materials culled from her private email account which the U.S. intelligence community has since classified as 'top secret,' making light of a reporter who asked if she had 'wiped the server' clean.

'What, like with a cloth or something?' Clinton chuckled? 'Well, no. I don't know how it works digitally at all.'

The contentious exchanges with reporters from CNN and Fox News came during a press conference following a town hall event in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Clinton stuck to the most recent version of her denial that she may have exposed state secrets to prying eyes by exclusively using a non-secure email account, hosted in her upstate New York home, during the four years she was secretary of state.

'Whether it was a personal account or a government account,' she said, 'I did not send classified material. And I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified – which is the way you know whether something is.'

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ORANGE IS THE NEW HILLARY: Clinton insisted on Tuesday that she would have known if she had sent or received classified information because it would have been marked 'classified'

CONDUCTING THE PRESS: The former secretary of state downplayed again the question of whether she owes new explanations as more classified documents come to light

Clinton was one of just 20 high-ranking officials whom President Barack Obama named in a December 2009 executive order as having the authority to classify material as 'top secret.'

That's the designation now given to the contents of two emails that she turned over to the State Department last year from her private account.

An aide to a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee told DailyMail.com shortly after the press conference that Clinton's claim 'is beyond bizarre and entirely nonsensical.'

'She was one of a few dozen people in Obama's administration with the knowledge and experience to decide if something was top secret,' the aide said after a promise of anonymity so he could speak his mind.

'The way you decide if something is classified, when you're the secretary of state, isn't looking for a stamp. It's looking at the contents. This is the worst buck-passing I've seen since Hillary's husband decided there was more than one way to define the word "is".'

Clinton ultimately cut her press conference short after insisting that the controversy over hundreds of her emails that Intelligence Community inspectors now believe might need to be classified 'has nothing to do with me and it has nothing to do with the fact that my account was personal.'

'It's the process by which the government, and sometimes in disagreement between various agencies of the government, make decisions about what can and cannot be disclosed,' she said.

'What I did was legally permitted, number one, first and foremost, okay?' Clinton snapped at one reporter.

'Number two, I turned over, out of an abundance of an attempt to be helpful over anything that I thought was even vaguely related.'

That mass-disclosure, as Clinton acknowledged in March, came only after the existence of her private email address was disclosed by a Romanian hacker – and after her staff culled more than 30,000 emails for her to decide to erase.

'My personal e-mails are my personal business, right?' she asked. 'We went through a painstaking process and turned over 50,000 pages of anything we thought could be work related. Under the law that decision is made by the official. I was the official. I made those decisions.'

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS ... Clinton described the after-the-fact determination that her private email server contained classified documents as the result of a squabble between government agencies that 'has nothing to do with me'

Clinton also described the FBI's seizure last week of her server hardware as another voluntary exercise.

'In order to be as cooperative as possible, we have turned over the server,' she said. 'They can do whatever they want to with the server to figure out what's there or what's not there. That's for the people investigating it to figure it out.'

'But we turned over everything that was work-related. Every single thing. Personal stuff, we did not. I had no obligation to do so and did not.'

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Allison Moore said in a statement that the Democrats' presidential front-runner is hiding the ball.

'Rather than come clean, Hillary Clinton continued to mislead the American people about her secret email server that put classified information and our national security at risk,' Moore said.

'The truth is, Hillary Clinton has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid transparency and accountability for her reckless actions as Secretary of State.'