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 "That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility,"
Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic Party's nomination in
the 2016 presidential election, said in an interview with ABC News,
while still insisting that she violated no rules.
"What I had done was allowed, it was above board," she said. "But in
retrospect, as I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I
should have used two accounts. One for personal, one for
work-related emails."
In two earlier interviews in the past week, Clinton had declined to
apologize for the controversial email arrangement while working as
the nation's top diplomat, saying it was
allowed by the State Department.
Clinton has been forced to defend herself against growing public
scrutiny of how she handled sensitive government information since
the email arrangement first came to light in March.
 The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now examining the email
server to see whether any information, including classified
information, was mishandled.
In addition to persistent criticism from opponents and media
questions, the State Department's court-ordered monthly releases of
the more than 30,000 emails in question has kept the issue in the
public eye, roiling Clinton's efforts to nail down the nomination.
Recent polls have found more than half of all voters say she is
untrustworthy.
VEXING QUESTION
On Tuesday, U.S. officials said the State Department plans to move
about 50 workers into temporary jobs to bolster the office sifting
through her emails and grappling with a vast backlog of other
requests for information to be declassified.
The move illustrates the huge administrative burden caused by
Clinton's decision to use a private email address as secretary of
state and a judge's ruling in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit that they be released.
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Separately, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he was
naming Ambassador Janice Jacobs to serve as the State Department's
"transparency coordinator" to help the agency
respond to FOIA and congressional requests more efficiently.
One particularly vexing question for Clinton has been whether she
may have handled classified information on the private email system,
a practice that the government forbids.
Initially, Clinton said she handled no classified information on her
unsecured private email server. More recently, she has said she sent
and received no information that was "marked" classified, a position
she repeated on Tuesday in her interview with ABC.
Citing intelligence officials, the New York Times on Tuesday
reported that a special intelligence review of two emails she
received as secretary of state had endorsed a finding by the
inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails
contained highly classified information when she received them.
The review by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency concluded the emails, including one
about North Korea's nuclear program, were "Top Secret," when sent to
Clinton in 2009 and 2011, the paper said.
The Clinton campaign and the State Department disagreed with the
conclusion and noted that agencies within the government often have
different views of what should be classified.
(Writing by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Christian Plumb)
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