Hillary Clinton defends using personal email account

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during the Annual Women's Empowerment event at the United Nations in New York March 10, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

UNITED NATIONS-- Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday defended using personal email account in official business of her four-year tenure, yet she also told reporters that "it would be better" to have used two separate devices for her personal and work email accounts.

"It would be better" and "it would have been smarter to use two devices" for her personal and work email addresses, said Clinton at a hastily arranged press conference after she addressed a UN meeting on gender equality.

Clinton, the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has been under fire out of concerns including as a potential security risk in her correspondence for using a private email account for official business when she served as the top US diplomat.

It was her first major public engagement with reporters in five months since a political event in the US state of Iowa last September.

There were no security breaches of her personal email server and her personal email server will remain private, she said.

After her speech in a large UN conference room, Clinton strode down a large hallway to a microphone set in the glare of television lights in front of a crowd of reporters waiting outside the Security Council chambers and read from a prepared statement about the women's conference before turning to the issue of the day.

"When I got to work as secretary of state I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two," she said, referring to a smart phone.

"Looking back, it would have been better if I simply used a second email account and carried a second phone," she said. "But at the time this just didn't seem like an issue."

Nonetheless, Clinton was quick to point out "the vast majority" of her work emails went to government employees at their government addresses and were "captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department."