Clinton bids to end email controversy

Trying to get her presidential campaign back on track, Hillary Clinton says she should have used a government email address while working as the nation’s top diplomat instead of a private one. The admission sought to quell a political furore some Democratic allies say she could no longer avoid.

However, questions still linger over Clinton’s email habits. If all of her emails are eventually made open, don’t expect to see much correspondence with her husband — or any correspondence at all. Bill Clinton has not used email since he became president of the United States.

Clinton told reporters that emails she deleted from her personal account contained “personal communications from my husband and me”. However, a spokesman for Bill Clinton, Matt McKenna, told reporters earlier this week the former president had only “sent two emails in his life”.

As president, Clinton’s first email was a message to John Glenn, the former senator and astronaut who in 1998 was making a return trip to space. His other email was to US troops serving in the Adriatic.

Critics seized on other alleged inconsistencies in her explanation for deleting emails. In February she told a Silicon Valley conference she uses multiple electronic devices: “I have an iPad, a mini-iPad, an iPhone and a BlackBerry.”

On Tuesday Mrs Clinton said she used the private email account out of “convenience” to avoid carrying two devices.

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 woman president.

Instead, questions about Clinton’s email habits have dominated her activities in the past week, following revelations 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 UN, 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”.

However, she also acknowledged she deleted messages related to personal matters. She refused calls from Republicans to turn over the email server she kept at her home to an independent reviewer.