Hillary fires back on emails: ‘Everything I did was permitted’

Hillary Clinton fiercely defended her use of a personal email account while at the State Department on Tuesday, arguing she did nothing wrong and has complied with orders to release records from her time as secretary.

“Everything I did was permitted,” Clinton said. “There was no law, no regulation, there was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.

{mosads}Questions over Clinton’s use of a private server have dogged her candidacy since she entered the White House race in April.

Earlier this year, Clinton revealed she had erased tens of thousands of emails from her tenure at the State Department that she said were personal in nature. The remaining emails, related to her official duties, were handed over to the administration for archiving.

In May, a District of Columbia judge ordered the State Department to release the emails in batches every 30 days.

Republicans have made the private email account the centerpiece of their attacks against Clinton, using it to raise questions about her trustworthiness.

Making her first national media interview since becoming a presidential candidate, Clinton on Tuesday urged reporters to “take a deep breath” about the controversy.

She said she used one device for sending emails, that all of her emails went into a government system, and that she turned over 55,000 pages of messages for release “because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me.”

“This is being blown up with no basis in law or in fact. That’s fine, I get it,” Clinton said. “This is being, in effect, used by the Republicans in Congress. OK. But I want people to understand what the truth is, and the truth is, everything I did was permitted, and I went above and beyond.”

“I turned over everything I was obligated to turn over and then I moved on,” she added. “People delete their personal emails, their work emails, whatever emails they have on a regular basis. I turned over everything I could imagine.”