Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton tried Tuesday evening to halt the damage her use of a private email server is doing to her White House campaign, taking her explanation directly to the public via a Facebook post.
“Yes, I should have used two email addresses, one for personal matters and one for my work at the State Department. Not doing so was a mistake. I’m sorry about it, and I take full responsibility,” she wrote.
The post also reflects an awareness that the controversy is hurting her in polls, which once gave her presidency the seeming inevitability of a coronation — Mrs. Clinton once had 50-percentage-point leads over the few little-known Democrats opposing her in the primary and was ahead of every likely Republican challenger by double digits.
“I know this is a complex story. I could have — and should have — done a better job answering questions earlier. I’m grateful for your support, and I’m not taking anything for granted,” she wrote.
Her post repeats many of her points from an ABC News interview earlier Tuesday that was her first apology for the server arrangement, sometimes using the same wording.
“What I had done was allowed, it was above board. 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. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility,” she said in the ABC interview.
She assures users of the world’s biggest social-media outlet at the start of the post that “I wanted you to hear this directly from me.”
Her post repeats several of the claims she has made in the months since the unique arrangement was discovered — that “my use of a personal email account was aboveboard and allowed under the State Department’s rules. Everyone I communicated with in government was aware of it. And nothing I ever sent or received was marked classified at the time.”
According to a report in the New York Times in Tuesday’s editions, the Clinton campaign plans to be more spontaneous in the future as Mrs. Clinton’s public image continues to suffer as the email scandal burgeons to include revelations that she sent and received classified information on the unsecured server.
Tuesday’s multiple apologies also come one day after she insisted in an interview with the Associated Press that she had nothing to apologize for because “what I did was allowed.”
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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