WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton on Sunday further addressed the controversy over her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, insisting she had nothing to do with setting up the server, choosing the server, transitioning to the server, turning over emails from the server or pretty much doing anything other than continuing to send emails.
"I wasn't that focused on my email account, to be clear here," Clinton told Chuck Todd on NBC’s "Meet The Press."
"[The server] was already there. It had been there for years. It is the system that my husband's personal office used when he got out of the White House. And so it was sitting there in the basement. It was not any trouble at all," Clinton said.
"I can't control the technical aspects of it. I'm not by any means a technical expert. I relied on people who were."
As for the notion that Clinton didn’t turn over all relevant emails stored on the server to the State Department, she said she didn’t have anything to do with that, either.
“All I can tell you is that when my attorneys conducted this exhaustive process, I did not participate, I didn't look at them,” she said. “I wanted them to be as clear in their process as possible. I didn't want to be looking over their shoulder. If they thought it was work-related, it would go to the State Department."
And once everything had been turned over, she didn’t have anything to do with deciding how the remaining emails got erased, she said.
"My attorney said, 'Well, what do you want us to do with all these personal emails?' I said, 'Well, I don't need to keep them. I don't need them or want them.' So they then talked to the IT server, the technical people who were responsible for maintaining them and said, 'You know, we don't need them anymore,'" Clinton said. "That's the limit of my knowledge."
The candidate also continued to obfuscate about the reasons the State Department first asked her and several other former secretaries of state to go back through their email records.
Clinton and her camp have said the State Department made the request because they recognized their own record keeping system was inadequate. But State Department officials told The Washington Post this week that the request was prompted by the discovery that Clinton had, in fact, used a private server.
"They found gaps in their own record keeping," Clinton said Sunday.
"They found discrepancies in their record keeping -- not in my records, per se, in their overall record keeping," she said Sunday. "It got us to the same place. We looked through everything. We gave them everything work related."
As for the notion that Clinton used the private email server in order to avoid accountability or make it more difficult for Congress to get a hold of her communications -- that’s, of course, wrong too, she said.
“It’s totally ridiculous. That never crossed my mind,” Clinton said.
Clinton’s use of the private email server has continued to roil her campaign aspirations and raise eyebrows around Washington, particularly with news this week that some of the emails Clinton -- or Clinton’s aides, technical experts, or whoever else -- had deemed personal actually turned out to be work related.