Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to reporters
Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to get the rollout of her likely presidential campaign back on track by admitting she should have used a government email address while serving as the nation’s top diplomat — an admission that sought to quell a political furor that even some Democratic allies said she could no longer avoid.
The focus on Clinton’s emails has jumbled what had been expected to be a smooth glide toward the kickoff of her presidential campaign next month. The former secretary of state had planned to spend March promoting her work on women’s equality, a signature issue for someone who could become the nation’s first female president.
Instead, questions about Clinton’s email habits have dominated her activities in the past week, following revelations that she used a personal email account at the State Department and did so via a private server kept at her home in suburban New York.
While Democrats have dismissed the notion that Clinton’s emails are something voters will care about come Election Day 2016, her silence — aside from a late-night tweet sent last week — had led several of her former colleagues in the Senate to urge her to tell her side of the story.
During a news conference Tuesday at the United Nations, after she had delivered a previously scheduled speech on women’s rights, Clinton pledged that all her work-related email would be made public “for everyone to see.” But she also acknowledged that she deleted tens of thousands of emails related to personal matters. She refused calls from Republicans to turn over the email server she kept at her home to an independent reviewer.
“The server contains personal communications from my husband and me, and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities, and the server will remain private,” Clinton told reporters who crammed into a hallway to ask questions at her first news conference in more than two years.
Clinton defiantly declared that she did nothing improper in exclusively using a private account for official emails while secretary of state.
“I fully complied with every rule I was governed by,” Clinton said in the 20-minute news conference that marked her first comments on the controversy. AP
No Comments