Hillary Clinton APOLOGIZES for email lapses and says 'That was a mistake'

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Clinton's visited ABC News on Tuesday for an interview with anchor David Muir as part of another campaign reboot amid tough questions about classified documents and her email security
Muir asked her how much responsibility she bears for allowing sensitive material to commingle with her personal emails on her private server
'That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility,' she told him
On Friday she told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC only that she was 'sorry that this has been confusing to people'
She also predicted Friday that she would 'keep saying the same thing,' only to change her tune four days later
Clinton told the Associated Press only Monday that she wouldn't apologize for setting up her own home-brew email system because it 'was allowed'

By David Martosko, Us Political Editor For Dailymail.com

Published: 16:01 EST, 8 September 2015 | Updated: 16:26 EST, 8 September 2015

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Democratic presdiential front-runner Hillary Clinton offered her first direct apology on Tuesday for launching a series of federal investigations and risking the exposure of national secrets by setting up a private email server in her home for her use as secretary of state.

'That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility,' Clinton told ABC News anchor David Muir in an interview Tuesday.

That song is a far cry from the one she offered on Friday, when she balked twice at the chance to apologize during a sit-down with MSNBC journalist Andrew Mitchell.

In that interview, she said only that she was 'sorry that this has been confusing to people.'

She also projected an air of confidence and suggested that her story wouldn't change. Four days later, it has.

'I feel that I have questions to answer,' Clinton told Mitchell, 'which I intend to do at every turn .. about the whole email issue, and keep saying the same thing.'

THE NEW, NEW HILLARY: Clinton apologized on Tuesday for her reputation-emolishing email problem, saying: 'That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility'

JUST FOUR DAYS AGO: Clinton told MSNBC on Friday that while wouldn't apologize for her self-inflicted email wounds, and that she was only 'sorry that this has been confusing to people'

'I take responsibility and it wasn’t the best choice,' she said Friday, adding in a lawyerly fashion that 'I now disagree with the choice that I made.'

Muir's interview will air Tuesday evening on the ABC News 'World News Tonight' program.

The Republican National Committee fired a shot across Clinton's bow shortly after ABC publicized Clinton's apology.

'The only thing Hillary Clinton regrets is that she got caught and is dropping in the polls, not the fact her secret email server left classified information exposed to the Russians and Chinese,' RNC spokesman James Hewitt said in a statement to DailyMail.com.

'Hillary Clinton's reckless attempt to skirt government transparency laws put our national security at risk and shows she cannot be trusted in the White House,' he said.

Mitchell told her MSNBC colleagues Tuesday on 'Morning Joe' that she thought the former secretary of state would never accept responsibility for something she thought was legal and permissible.

Clinton 'is not going to apologize,' she said. 'She says she did nothing wrong.'

'It was not illegal,' Mitchell added, 'but there was plenty of guidance, I should say, against it.'

Mitchell also said she cut herself off after 12 minutes of questions about the email saga on Friday because she thought Clinton's staff would end the interview abruptly and she had other topcis to cover.

'We were told we had a 15-minute interview,' Mitchell said. 'I asked more than 12 minutes on emails before I felt – out of concern that they would cut it off, obviously – that I had to move on. I couldn’t ask everything that I did want to ask.'

On Monday Clinton told the Associated Press that she did not plan to offer any mea culpas, because 'what I did was allowed' by the State Department, the agency she ran for four years at the beginning of President Barack Obama's administration.

'What I did was allowed. It was allowed by the State Department. The State Department has confirmed that,' Clinton told the AP in Iowa.

'I did not send or receive any information marked classified,' she said, calling on language that has now become regimented and standardized in her campaign.

'I take the responsibilities of handling classified materials very seriously and did so.'

Clinton's latest raft of interviews and brief press conferences has been a study in a shift from derision to contrition – happening so fast that she risks look inauthentic.

Only two weeks ago she mocked questions about whether or not she ordered her email server 'wiped' clean – 'What, like with a cloth?' – and cracked jokes about using Snapchat because the messages 'disappear all by themselves.'

But in recent weeks she has begun to express a measured sense of regret. That contined Friday with a look back at her transition from the U.S. Senate to the State Department.

'I did all my business on my personal email [in the Senate],' Clinton said. 'I was not thinking a lot when I got in [as secretary of state].'

'There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world. I didn’t really stop and think, "What kind of email system will there be?"'

'This was fully above-board, people knew I was using a personal email. I did it for convenience,' she said. 'I sent emails that I thought were work-related to people’s "dot-gov" accounts.'

Those statements, too, could come back to haunt Hillary.

A week ago when the State Department released more than 7,000 pages of the emails Clinton chose to turn over late last year – she deleted more than half of her complete archive – one threat showed that State's own computer help-desk didn't recognize her only email address when it was reported as having problems.

And several messages, including some now considered classified, werepart of conversations between Clinton and longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal, who was banned from working at the State Department and never had a 'dot-gov' address.

So far, inspectors from U.S. Intelligence Community agencies have redacted – censored – 189 of her emails before releasing them, specifically on the grounds that they contained material that should have been stamped as classified.