Private email was easier, Clinton says
Former secretary of state says use of her own account was more convenient
WASHINGTON— She just didn’t want to carry two cellphones.
The return of her defensive crouch, the renewed talk of her family’s penchant for secrecy, the campaign rollout gone wrong — all, according to Hillary Clinton, because she thought it would be easier to lug around a single BlackBerry than a second one as well.
Clinton had been silent, save for a single late-night Twitter post, since the revelation last week that she did her official emailing as secretary of state from hdr22@clintonemail.com, a personal account attached to a private sever at her home in upstate New York. She attempted to stifle the controversy Tuesday by acknowledging she had erred — and claiming she had been seeking not concealment but “convenience.
“Looking back, it would’ve been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts,” she told a packed news conference at the United Nations, where she had just delivered a speech on women’s rights. “I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.”
Clinton said she had not broken any rules. But her avoidance of government email contravened White House guidelines, shielded her from freedom of information requests and left her more vulnerable to hackers. The chaotic 20-minute news conference, her first in six months, may have raised as many questions as it answered.
Most significantly, Clinton announced that she deleted all of her “personal” emails — more than 31,000, her office said in a statement later — before she turned over another 30,000 official emails to the State Department.
“At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emails: emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes,” she said.
Clinton “tried to be as forthcoming as possible,” said University of Maryland communication professor Shawn Parry-Giles, who wrote a book on media coverage of Clinton, but the news conference is “not go- ing to quiet the controversy because of the deleted emails and the questions about that.
“Even if she is within the bounds of the policy, which it seems that she was, it’s still not going to quiet down,” Parry-Giles said. “If she weren’t running for president, it would probably go away. But she is going to run for president. It won’t go away.”
Clinton may face no serious opposition for the Democratic presidential nomination. Her chief antagonist on the emails is Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, who leads a House committee investigating the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
Republicans have tried valiantly to find a way to turn the Benghazi in- cident and its aftermath into a conspiracy involving Clinton. The deletion of messages is more grist for critics trying to convince voters that she did something wrong even in the absence of evidence.
In a statement after the news conference, Clinton’s office said it specifically searched for emails with the terms “Benghazi” and “Libya” before disposing of the personal emails. Clinton herself said she has “absolute confidence” that all official emails were handed over. This was insufficient for Gowdy, who said she should hand over the server to a “neutral, detached third-party arbiter.
“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,” Gowdy said in a statement.
Several other Clinton claims were also met with immediate skepticism from journalists and Republicans.
At least one high-ranking official in the Obama administration at the same time had both personal and official accounts on the same phone. Clinton said she always made sure her work emails were preserved by emailing other U.S. officials at their own government addresses, a strategy that would not have worked for her emails to others. She said the home sever contained private emails between herself and her husband, though the former president says he has sent precisely two emails his whole life. And at a Silicon Valley event in February, Clinton said that she does use two phones, an iPhone and a BlackBerry, plus an iPad Mini.