Hillary Clinton pulled back from her refusal Monday to acknowledge an error in judgement over the handling of her emails, admitting Tuesday evening she had made a “mistake,” but only because of the “diversion” the controversy has caused.
“I just think that it was a mistake not to have used two [email accounts] because it’s caused all of this, you know, uproar and commotion,” Clinton said during an editorial board meeting with the Quad-City Times in Iowa.
“Look, I regret that this has caused so much of a diversion, which I think is unfounded, but I will continue to answer the questions that I’m asked about it,” she said.
Her comments came just one day after she struck a more defiant tone about her emails during a televised town hall event in New Hampshire.
“No, I’m not willing to say it was an error in judgment because what — nothing that I did was wrong. It was not — it was not in any way prohibited,” Clinton said during the CNN event Monday when asked about the controversy.
Clinton dismissed suggestions Tuesday that her decision to shield all of her communications — some of which contained sensitive and potentially classified information — from the public by using a private server should cause voters to question her judgement.
“I’m sorry that I used one instead of two email accounts,” she said. “But I don’t think that goes to the judgement and experience of the person running to be president. If that were, everybody I know of would be disqualified.”
In her defense of the unusual email arrangement, Clinton steered clear of mentioning the legal dispute over whether she sent and received classified material on her unsecured server. The FBI is presently investigating whether she and her staff violated laws meant to protect such sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.
“The fact is, I sent all my work-based email to state.gov addresses. So they were in the system,” Clinton argued Tuesday. “So there was no break in what would have happened if I would have been doing it from a separate email account.”
However, Clinton sent a significant number of emails she herself deemed “work-related” to addresses outside of the government system.
Two of her most trusted aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, both used private email accounts to send at least a portion of their official emails. Her close friend and informal advisor, Sidney Blumenthal, communicated with Clinton exclusively through a private email account.
Her dealings with a wide variety of corporate executives, professors, Democratic donors and think-tank stalwarts took place over private channels that would not have captured emails on the “state.gov” servers.
Those included diplomatic discussions now deemed classified, such as exchanges with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who served as special envoy to the Middle East quartet during Clinton’s time as secretary of state.
Even so, Clinton maintained that her decision to forego use of an official email account — where all of her messages would have been subject to review under the Freedom of Information Act, not just the ones she selected for the State Department — was allowed under the rules that existed when she entered office.
“Look, I know that this remains a subject of some interest,” she said. “The facts have not changed. I made a decision which, at the time, I thought was a convenient decision, it was permitted, I did it. Nobody ever said anything contrary to me.”
“Then when I said, ‘Let my emails become public,’ that was something nobody else has ever done, at all, in the government. Maybe you can get them in 50 years, but I’m doing it in real time,” she added.
Clinton was referring to a tweet she sent in March indicating she had asked the State Department to make all 30,000 of her emails public. Before handing those messages over, she deleted an equal number off her server that she has characterized as “personal in nature.”
However, the publication of her emails did not begin until a federal judge forced the State Department to begin posting the records online through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the agency at first attempted to fight.
The State Department is presently fighting a legal battle with the federal court over the publication of the final batch of Clinton’s emails, which was slated for Friday. Agency officials have said they need an additional month to process the remaining pages, meaning the last emails may not emerge until after the first wave of Democratic primaries has occurred.
