Presumed 2016 presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has stormed back onto America's political stage, seeking to quell concerns she used private email while secretary of state.
In her first public comments since the controversy erupted last week, Clinton said she exclusively used a personal email account as a "matter of convenience" and insisted that the private server she used suffered no security breaches.
She also said "no classified material" was divulged in the emails, while promising she had turned over all work communications to the State Department.
But of the 63,320 emails Clinton sent and received during her four years as top diplomat, she defiantly said about 30,000 of them were personal, private records - such as those planning her daughter's wedding and "yoga routines" - and had been deleted.
And in a move not calculated to silence her critics, she said the Clinton family server on which all her emails were stored would not be turned over to the government or an independent commission.
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Clinton, mindful of how several Republican lawmakers have questioned her actions, said she had taken "unprecedented" steps to comply with the law requiring official records be kept.
"Looking back, it might have been smarter" to use two separate phones and email accounts, Clinton told reporters after speaking at a United Nations women's conference.
"I thought one device would be simpler, and obviously it hasn't worked out that way."
Some 21 months after she left office, following a State Department request to her and previous secretaries of state, Clinton turned over some 55,000 pages of emails.
"We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department," she said.
But she offered no avenue for proving that potentially embarrassing work-related emails were not permanently deleted.
Asked directly if she or her team destroyed any work emails, she was unequivocal: "We did not."
The former first lady and US senator has been accused, mainly by her Republican opponents, of trying to improperly keep her emails out of the public domain.
While Clinton apparently contravened State Department guidelines against conducting official business on personal email, she insisted her actions were legal.
The 20-minute appearance, her first before a swarm of reporters since the email revelations last week, was an effort for the famous Democrat to tamp down the uproar before she possibly launches a run for the White House, as early as April.
