Spotlight: Hillary Clinton says campaign unaffected by email scandal, refuses to apologize yet again

Hillary Clinton said on Monday the controversy around her use of a private email system while serving as the top U.S. diplomat did not affect her campaign.

"It's a distraction, certainly," Clinton said in an interview with The Associated Press (AP) during a Labor Day campaign in Iowa. "But it hasn't in any way affected the plan for our campaign, the efforts we're making to organize here in Iowa and elsewhere in the country."

As the Clinton camp fails to end controversy around the Clinton's exclusive use of her private email account and server from 2009 to 2013, a pair of NBC News/Marist polls released Sunday showed that Clinton's favorability rating among voters in key early-voting states dipped.

According to the polls, Clinton trails Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders by nine points in New Hampshire, and her lead over Sanders in Iowa has shrunk from 24 points in July to 11 points.

A Gallup poll on Friday also showed that Clinton's favorability rating has dropped to an all-time low.

Still, Clinton downplayed the fallout of the email controversy which was taking a heavy toll on the perception of her trustworthiness and honesty among voters.

"I still feel very confident about the organization and the message that my campaign is putting out," Clinton said Monday.

Meanwhile, for the second time within four days, Clinton said she did not need to apologize for her exclusive use of the private email account and server.

"What I did was allowed. It was allowed by the State Department. The State Department has confirmed that," she told AP.

As in her interview with MSNBC on Friday, Clinton said she had never exchanged any information marked classified via the private email system but also acknowledged that it would have been a "better choice" if she had use two separate email accounts.

At a press conference in March, Clinton said she had exchanged about 60,000 emails from her private email account during her stint in the Obama administration, among which about half were personal and thus deleted. The Clinton camp turned over the other half, 30,000 emails in total, to the State Department last year.

The controversy around Clinton's emailing practice burst into public view earlier August after the inspector general for the U.S. intelligence community revealed that two of the thousands of emails held by Clinton contained top-secret information.

"There is always a debate among different agencies about what something should be retroactively (marked classified)," Clinton said on Monday. "But at the time, there were none. So I'm going to keep answering the questions and providing the facts so that people can understand better what happened."

Also, Clinton's Republican rivals have long claimed that Clinton had deleted certain work-related emails, mainly on the 2012 Benghazi attacks that claimed four American lives, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, to protect herself.

Clinton will attend a congressional hearing in October on the 2012 Benghazi attacks, and the email controversy is likely to assume a predominant role in the hearing. Enditem