Hillary Clinton explains private emails with 'Just the Facts'

WASHINGTON, July 14 (UPI) -- Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign posted a 3,600 word fact sheet about her email usage Tuesday, its most comprehensive response yet to her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

The explainer covers multiple topics, from why Clinton stored emails on a private server instead of an official State Department account to whether the account violates government transparency policies to who decided what should be given to the State Department.

The document doesn't' cover any new ground, aggregating news coverage, statistic and quotes from Clinton's previous speeches and statements. It does, however, offer the most detailed and extensive answers from the Clinton campaign and acknowledges that the issue is a lingering distraction for her second bid for the White House.

Questions about Clinton's email emerged in early March and have dogged her campaign. Republicans have used the issue as a jumping-off point to prove she is not trustworthy.

Formatted as a Q and A, the fact sheet goes over more than a dozen questions and will likely serve as a blue print for Clinton and her allies when asked about the issue.

"When Clinton got to the department, she opted to use her personal email account as a matter of convenience," the document said. "It enabled her to reach people quickly and keep in regular touch with her family and friends more easily given her travel schedule. That is the only reason she used her own account."

The campaign said her email account was known to more than 100 State Department and U.S. government colleagues and followed all regulations. Previous Secretary of State Colin Powell used a personal email account during his tenure, the campaign said, quoting Politico reporting. The document said 90 percent of her emails went to state.gov accounts and would have been archived and available for Freedom of Information Act and Congressional inquiries before she turned over paper copies of the emails. She primarily used her Blackberry for email but also accessed her email account on her iPad.

Of the 62,320 emails sent and received on her system while secretary of state, 30,490 were given to the State Department as potential federal records. The remaining 31,830 were private and deleted, the campaign said.

The campaign said Clinton's attorneys reviewed her emails for public release by searching for any emails to and from .gov accounts. That search flagged 27,500 of the 30,490 printed copies provided to the State Department. They also searched for names of more than 100 U.S. government officials and sorted by sender and recipient. Finally, they searched by specific terms that included "Benghazi" and "Libya."

"These additional three steps yielded just over another 2,900 emails, including emails from former administration officials and long-time friends that may not be deemed by the State Department to be federal records," the campaign wrote. "And hundreds of these emails actually had already been forwarded onto the state.gov system and captured in real-time."

Clinton's campaign also said there is "no evidence" there was ever a cybersecurity break and there was never an unauthorized intrusion in the system.