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Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton maintained Sunday that she has done all she can to take responsibility and "be as transparent as possible" about the use of her private email server while she was secretary of state.

"It is like a drip, drip, drip," Clinton said in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I want these questions to be answered."

Clinton said she could not guarantee that the FBI will not find any emails on her private server that will require further explanation on her part, because her attorneys handled that review and she did not participate.

"I'm very sure that my attorneys did the most meticulous job that could have been done," she told NBC News' Chuck Todd.

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Clinton again called her use of a private server "a mistake" and said that if she had to do it all over again, she "would have used a separate email account."

Asked about the recent discovery of an email chain from January 2009 between herself and Gen. David Petraeus — two months before Clinton has said she used the private account -- the former secretary of state said she assumed anything she sent to a ".gov" account "would be captured."

"There was a transition period. I wasn't that focused on my email account," she said when pressed.

Clinton called the possibility of using a private email server to avoid freedom of information requests or congressional subpoenas "totally ridiculous."

The former secretary of state said she used the private server because "it was sitting there in the basement" and it was the system President Bill Clinton used after he left office.

"It was not any trouble at all. I know there are a lot of people who are questioning that, but the fact is that it was there," she said.

Clinton also explained that she didn't know a lot about how the server worked because she's "not, by any means, a technical expert."

In a lighter moment, Clinton apologized for joking about wiping her server "with a cloth" last month. "I know I was a little sarcastic in one exchange with the press," she said. "I'm sorry, guys."