At one point, when asked directly whether she had wiped her server clean before it was handed over to the Justice Department, Clinton appeared to crack a joke:

Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to grow frustrated with new questions about her use of a private email server as secretary of State, insisting to reporters Tuesday that a review of whether classified material was improperly transmitted over her account would also have happened if she'd used a government account.

More of what Clinton said Tuesday:

"I've been thinking about the fact that I get a lot of attention because I had a personal email account, as did other high-ranking officials in the State Department and elsewhere in the government. And I had not sent classified material, nor received anything marked classified.

"If I had had a separate government account, so that I had a totally designated government account and a totally designated personal account, and I started running for president and I said, 'I want the American people to see everything that was part of my time in the State Department, because I think it's educational, and I want the State Department to release all of my emails' -- which they already had, by the way, you know, in the government computer system -- we would be going through the same process.

"That's what I want Americans to understand. When something is released -- whether it's in response to a Freedom of Information request or in my case, where I said there's 55,000 pages out there, please put them out, there is a process that has to be gone through. You want to make sure nobody's personal email is on there and other personnel issues -- those kinds of things. So we would be going through the same [thing] because other agencies get to make the same claims. Like, you know, this may not have been an issue in 2009, but now it is. Or in 2011 this should have been handled differently than it was.

"It 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 disagreements between various agencies of the government, make decisions about what can and can't be disclosed.

"So I'm very comfortable that this will eventually get resolved, and the American people will have plenty of time to figure it out."

Later, when Fox News' Ed Henry followed up, Clinton said, "Ed, you're not listening to me," and repeated her explanation of the review process.

It was then that Clinton was asked repeatedly whether she "wiped the server."

"Like with a cloth or something?" she said. "No, no. I don't know how it works digitally at all."