Which the state department is now sifting through. Since the story broke, it has overshadowed every move she has made including her speech today at the womens empowerment principles event at United Nations thats under way right now. We have a team of reporters and analysts standing by. But first, lets set the scene. Our chief washington correspondent jake tapper is with me. Jake this is a critically important event for the former secretary of state, assuming as all of us do she wants to be the next president of the United States. Right. I think its a foregone conclusion that she will announce her candidacy sometime in the next couple months. Really the only thing being debated right now by her advisers is when and how. This is the first test for her as a president ial candidate in the 2016 run. There are a lot of unanswered questions. So far, a lot of political observers have noted this is something she could have tried to answer questions for either back when Michael Schmidt of the New York Times was working on stories about these emails to any time in the last eight days as you point out. Its a question as to why this has been allowed to build and build and build. It is a different media environment, even just in 2008 when Hillary Clinton ran. And there are issues about not only what is she revealing to the state department what is she not, why she felt the need to go against the state departments own rules, rules that the state department under her watch criticized individuals in the department for not abiding by but also there are questions about cyber security. As you know in 2013 one of Hillary Clintons top advisers a guy named Sidney Blumenthal was hacked by a hacker and some of Hillary Clintons emails were released into the public. Gawker printed them. They didnt get a lot of attention at the time but they seem to be about detailed information having to do with the middle east and other items. And that was information that wouldnt fall under the purview of what secretary clintons supporters have said in the last week which is hey, any time she emailed anyone at the state department, that would be preserved because those individuals were using official email addresses. A lot of unanswered questions. This is really the first big test for Hillary Clinton, president ial candidate. How she handled this. So far, the only thing shes done is issue a short little tweet, saying shes handed over documents to the state department. She hopes they release those documents as soon as possible. The state department has to review all of those 55,000 pages to make sure that no confidential or secret classified information is there. But even in her tweet, and i dont know if we can put it up but the quote was Something Like i want to show the public my emails. Thats a little bit misleading because she doesnt want to show the public all of her emails. She wants to show the public the ones that she and her staff have handed over to the state department out of what one assumes are many more than 55,000 pages. All right. Stand by. I want to go to brianna keilar. Youre at the United Nations right now. Shes delivering a speech on womens issues girls issues. When she finishes that speech shes going to go to another room make a statement, and start answering reporters questions. Is that what you understand . Actually wolf, were expecting her to come right here to this stakeout position. Can you hear me wolf . Yes, i hear you. Go ahead. Okay. So were expecting Hillary Clinton to come here to this stakeout position after she finishes up her speech which is currently under way. Shes talking about womens empowerment. This is a speech that was previously scheduled. And this press conference was sort of lastminute tacked on to the end of this. Let me just describe the scene for you because its a crush of reporters and of cameras that otherwise wouldnt be here. Im looking right now at a line of at least 25 cameras, all of the News Networks represented. You can see just the crush of reporters who have had to scramble to get here today for what is such a key press conference. Were expecting that Hillary Clinton will address the folks here, that shell take at least a few questions. And we know that shes going to be asked about why she felt it was necessary to have this personal email account to house her emails on a personal server. We would imagine shell also be asked if she deleted any of these emails. These are question questions, and there are many many more for her to be asked. Stand by for a moment brianna. I want to bring in david gurgen. Shes been through this before. This is not necessarily new territory, but this is a critical moment given the fact that she presumably wants to run for president of the United States. Absolutely wolf. I think jake tapper is right. This is the first event of the campaign. Probably one of the most important events shes going to have. Its going to color everything else. The issue is going to be whether she walks away from this presser with more questions being asked by reporters. The if thats the case shes going to be in deeper controversy than she is now. If she comes out, squarely hits it, is transparent i think she has to find a way to make all of these emails available to a neutral third party, perhaps someone like lee hamilton who would command the respect on both sides of the aisle as way to clear this up. If she leaves this press conference with many of the emails in her own possession where nobody else can look at them i think the controversy is going to continue to dog her. And we dont know yet, david f shes going to just make a statement and answer two or three questions or if shes going to stay for a while half an hour, 45 minutes or an hour and answer a lot of questions. Thats going to be significant, right . I think it will be wolf. Even more significant is what steps shes willing to take. If she comes in and says i basically didnt understand and its somebody elses fault and, you know ive given over 55,000 pages, end of story, then the arguments are going to continue and this wont go away. I think it does feed into an unfortunate narrative. We have today two sides of Hillary Clinton. We have her defenlding ingdefending herself in this controversial setting with 25 cameras. And we have the Hillary Clinton now addressing the u. N. On womens empowerment, and that speech is being lost by the fact shes now coming out to answer all these questions. Thats why shes got to get this behind her so she can be heard again about what she really cares about. All right. Stand by david. Theres a lot to assess right now. Critically important moment in Hillary Clintons political career. Lets get some more analysis. Joining us our chief political analyst, Gloria Borger our cnn political commentator, hillary rosen, and our political commentator, Margaret Hoover. Gloria this is as all the of us agree, very, very important how she handles this. Why has she waited so long to do this . She probably should have done this on day one, right . Right. Wolf shes an undeclared candidate for the presidency. She doesnt have a Campaign Apparatus up and running. The downside of not running so quickly or getting in so early is the fact that i think they were unprepared for this controversy. I think they tried to kind of see if a tweet would work. In this particular circumstance it did not work. I would argue it backfired to a degree and raised more questions. Ping look we have to see how she answers the why question. Was it to be protective . Was it evasive . Or by the way, was it a bad idea to do this . I mean maybe Hillary Clinton would surprise us and say, you know what this wasnt such a great idea. What did she use these emails for . Did she ever get any advice from anybody about whether she could or could not do this . And whats she going to do about it . Is she going to have a third Party Archive some of it . Is she going to hand it all over to the National Archives . These are questions that all remain to be answered. How she handles it will tell us a lot about what the new Hillary Clinton is going to look like as a candidate in 2016. A lot of republicans have been of two minds when it comes to how to deal with this controversy. Some republicans saying this is something we need to be aggressive about, we need to be talking about how this is the same old clinton problem. They think the rules apply to everyone except for themselves. Other republicans saying you know what dont overplay your hand this is the trap the republicans fall into all the time. Sit back let the clintons do this to themselves. What are you hearing from the republican consultants, the people working on the soontobe president ial campaigns about how to deal with this . Thats the sort of general conundrum republicans face. Both the Institutional Party and Research Groups theyre trying not to veer too much into, you know wild accusations, sexism sort of 90s conspiracy theories and keeping the focus on the issues at hand being credible when dealing with reporters about this stuff. You know what im hearing, talking to republicans today, theyre literally just sitting back and watching getting their popcorn ready. Theyre going to watch to see what shes going to answer what she isnt going to answer. This isnt going to go away after today. She could talk for two minutes, 20 minutes, or two hours. And theres still going to be ongoing questions about this from republicans, from reporters. This is the world we live in. And from the benghazi committee. But as you said i think theyre trying to keep the focus on just what shes going to say and then after that see what happens and sort of push the media to ask more questions. And hillary rosen, it isnt just the republicans who are expressing chagrin at falling into another particularly bleak and dreary episode of i love the 90s. It is democrats also saying, oh, god, here we go again. This is what we went through in the 90s when bill and Hillary Clinton were running the country. Secrecy, proclivity to delay and delay and delay. What are you hearing from democrats . Yeah i dont think democrats are going that far. I think its kind of unfair to talk about it in that context at this point. Look you know i think peter and david just made the same point, which is almost no matter what she says today people are going to say its not enough. So i think this is kind of the test we have to apply when we listen to what shes saying which is is she giving a reasonable explanation for why she used a personal email address . Do we think there is malintent there . And do they have a process for closing this issue out . If you look at general polls today, people still really arent that interested in this kind of insider game. People really still like Hillary Clinton and believe that as secretary of state, she really did move the ball forward for this country. Thats what her speech is about at the u. N. Today. I think thats what most democrats are encouraging people to focus on. So my guess is that shell give some leeway today in terms of making people happy with answers to their questions, but shes not going to answer everybodys questions. Dana bash is our chief congressional correspondent. Shes joining us from florida right now. I know youre doing some reporting on jeb bush one of the republican president ial hopefuls out there. What are you hearing . I know that hes been reacting to this hillary email controversy for several days now. Thats right. He was one of the first to jump on this as soon as the news got out about the controversy. He is probably the most interesting to watch because he has some similar issues just regarding email not that he did anything wrong per se and thats what hes arguing. He has been talking about emails and making a big dole out of the fact that he is a very and has been when he was governor a very prolific emailer. Releasing 275,000 emails. But they were from a jeb. Org server. So it was not a public serve herb. It was a private server. Not unlike Hillary Clinton. But what the sources who im talking to here who are close to jeb bush are saying that theyre looking for is her explanation of why she used that email that personal email exclusively, and why it took until now to release them when they think that they have a nice jux position between that and the fact that he on his own released hundreds of thousands of emails to the public just a couple weeks ago. So certainly democrats are trying to say, aha you see, jeb bush has a private server. Jeb bush emailed on private emails. Its not only democrats, its not only Hillary Clinton. But theyre arguing its actually a case study in how different kinds of politicians handle this issue in a very different way. Were looking at live pictures from the microphone over there. Thats where Hillary Clinton will be walking over momentarily, were told making a statement, then answering reporters questions. We dont know if it will be one or two or three questions or a whole bunch of questions. Well of course have live coverage the first time shes going to go in depth and discuss the whole email controversy that has erupted over the past several days. Dana stand by. Margaret hoover is one of our cnn political commentators. Margaret do the republicans who are really going after her right now have a risk in going too far right now, overreaching if you will that could backfire . Sure and thats exactly what pete and jake were talking about. Youve really got republicans of two minds here. The republicans who want to default automatically to the 90s playbook and then the republicans who are a little more savvy saying hold on a sec, were not going to replay the playbook of the 90s. Lets see what Hillary Clinton says. She may give us enough rope to hang herself, so to speak, but id love to take it back to what hilary rosen said. She said, whatever hillary says wont be enough. Im not sure thats true. Hillary could take the opportunity to cut against hype. If she were to for example, take every single question sort of remember how Chris Christie did when the bridgegate scandal came up . He had this really long press conference spoke for almost an hour took every single question until there were no more questions in the room. If she really let it air out, had rjeasonable explanations that would cut against the narrative of secrecy and defensiveness. And frankly answer the questions about where are the emails, were any deleted . That would go a very long way to silencing sort of the paranoia on the right and frankly winning over that would stop this from plaguing the issue into the actual election which hasnt even started yet. Hilary rosen, you want to respond to that . Well i actually dont think that Chris Christie press conference really answered nearly enough questions, and i think that we saw that went on for weeks. I do think one thing margaret said is important, though which is if she expressed some regret as to what happened here and not just the flareup that happened after the fact but perhaps in retrospect it might have been better to not use her personal email for this business. You know that i think would be a big step. You know its just possible she may say that. But i dont think my point is i dont think its possible to satisfy everyones questions because theres too much vested interest in a story continuing. But hilary, we know its not about convincing every single person. Its about convincing the moderate majority of americans who are frankly the independentminded voters who fast forward to october of 2016 do they think hillary is responsible, believable transparent, and can lead the free world . Thats obviously who were going for. And i believe shes prepared to give a reasonable explanation that most people will understand. Do you think she will turn over the hard drive . Because i think thats key. Theres no way to really get rid of the questions about the emails unless shes willing to be fully transparent and turn over her hard drive. Well, jeb bush didnt do that either. So i dont know what Hillary Clinton is going to do. The federal government has different laws than state governments. Well its still public accountability. You have to hold them both to the same test. If you continue to do that then maybe ill join you on the turning over the hard drive request here. But he wasnt the secretary of state. We all know that. All right, guys. Stand by for a moment. Were looking at live pictures from the United Nations. An unusual place for a potential democratic president ial candidate to be making a statement then answering reporters questions on a political controversy thats erupted. Hillary clintons emails, should they all be made public . Whats going on right now . This is the first time shes going to go in depth and answer reporters questions. Well take a quick break. Shes getting ready to go to that microphone. Live coverage coming up here on cnn. At ally bank no branches equals great rates. Its a fact. Kind of like mute buttons equal danger. That sound good . Not being on this phone call sounds good. Its not muted. Was that you jason . It was geoffrey it was jason. It couldve been brenda. Hey mom, you want to live by the lake, right . Yeah. Theres here. Did you just share a listing with me . Look at this one. Its got a great view of the lake. Its really nice mom. Your dad wouldve loved this place. Youre not just looking for a house. Youre looking for a place for your life to happen. Zillow welcome back. Im wolf blitzer in washington. Youre looking at live pictures from the United Nations. The former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has just delivered a speech there on womens issues, girls issu