Mediaboss Marketing

"I opted for convenience."

That was the basic message that came out of Hillary Rodham Clinton's press conference Tuesday afternoon at the United Nations, the first time other than one brief tweet that the former secretary of State has directly addressed concerns that she used a private e-mail account and server for her official work while she was in office.

"Looking back, it would have been better if I had simply used a second e-mail account and carried a second phone" for private correspondence, Mrs. Clinton said at the conference. But at the time, she said, "I thought it would be easier to carry one device."

The press conference came a week after news about Clinton's private e-mail use broke, during which Clinton has been under increased pressure to answer questions about it. Even supporters, like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D) of California, were publicly encouraging her to speak, lest her silence prove too damaging.

Clinton seemed to be trying to wait it out, as she has successfully done with other scandals, but the questions and conspiracy theories from her opposition continued to grow.

On Tuesday, she emphasized repeatedly that she broke no rules. When she was in office, there was no prohibition on government officials using private e-mail accounts for official business (a policy that since has been updated). Other secretaries of State, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, also used personal e-mails for State Department business, though not as exclusively as Clinton did.

She also discounted suggestions that the 55,000 pages of e-mails she provided to the State Department which the Department has said it will be making public on a website once it has reviewed them didn't include all her official e-mails.

Clinton says that she had a thorough review done of her e-mails, and about half were work-related, while the other half "were not in any way related to my work," and included things like correspondence about her daughter's wedding and condolence notes to friends. She said most of her work-related e-mails went to officials at their government email address, and so were automatically recorded. Her direction was to "err on the side of providing anything that could possibly be viewed as work-related" to the State Department, she said.

But that statement essentially telling the American public to trust her may be hard for some of her critics to swallow.

"If theres one thing skeptics arent going to do its taking Hillary Clintons word for something," says Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College in California.

Go here to see the original:
Hillary Clinton: private e-mail was 'for convenience'