Clinton's limited hangout: Our view

Of all of the questions surrounding Hillary Clinton's use of private e-mail while she was the secretary of State, the one she answered most directly at Tuesday's news conference was why she did it to begin with.

Her decision, she said, was a matter of convenience. When she took the top job at State in 2009, government-issued devices apparently couldn't be set up to handle more than one e-mail account, and she didn't want to carry around more than one device to juggle official and personal business.

It's a plausible argument, though hardly likely to put to rest the controversy over her decision to shun the state.gov e-mail address she was assigned and rely exclusively on a private account, clintonemail.com, managed on a private server in her New York home.

If Clinton truly wants to put the e-mail matter behind her, she needs to go beyond merely complying with State Department requests to turn over work-related e-mails. She should make a bold statement about her commitment to transparency by turning over her server to the National Archives or the State Department's inspector general.

An independent third party could then determine whether all government-related e-mails were returned to State, and whether any of the 31,830 personal e-mails that Clinton "chose not to keep" should have been classified as public, assuming copies of those e-mails can still be retrieved.

At least for now, Clinton isn't going there. "The server will remain private," she said during the 20-minute news conference.

That's an untenable position. The server belongs to the public as much as it does to her.

True, nothing Clinton does will satisfy her biggest detractors, who will always suspect she is conspiring to hide something. Even so, she has to do enough to persuade most reasonable people to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Clinton is in this position not only because she made a personal choice about how many devices to keep in her purse. She is in it also because she went against governmental policy and instructions — including a memo to State Department employees sent from her own office in 2011— that official e-mails be sent out only on government accounts.

On Tuesday, Clinton repeatedly said "it would've been better" if she had simply used a second e-mail account and carried a second phone. Yes, it would have. And if she now has to go the extra mile, that's too bad. Mistakes have consequences.

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