Hillary Clinton sent work emails on a personal account during her tenure as secretary of state for convenience, but in hindsight would have sent messages on a separate government device, she said on Tuesday.
"Looking back, it would have been probably smarter to have used two devices but I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in possession of the State Department," Clinton said during a news conference after a speech at the United Nations.
She continued: "I did it for convenience, but now looking back I think it might have been smarter to have two devices from the very beginning."
The potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate added that most of her emails went to government employees and were kept in government logs after she sent them. Clinton's work-related emails were turned over to the State Department, while personal messages were kept private, she said.
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Clinton for the first time addressed her State Department email practices after a week of scrutiny and questions. She ignored the issue at a forum Monday while fellow Democrats urged her to speak out—and predicted she would—about her decision to conduct business in a private email account while secretary of state. Republicans are ramping up their attention to the issue.
She is under scrutiny over whether she fully complied with federal laws requiring government officials to preserve written communications involving official business. She used her own email server, traced to her home in Chappaqua, New York, giving herself more control over her email.
Clinton said she did not delete any work-related emails before giving them to officials. She said she was "very glad" that the State Department plans to post messages on its website.
"Those will be out in the public domain and people will be able to judge for themselves," Clinton said.
She added that her personal email system was not breached and said she "fully complied" with every correspondence rule. She stressed that she never sent "classified material" on her personal account.