A visibly vexed Hillary Clinton said Tuesday she’d done nothing wrong in her handling of a private email account and its associated server that she used exclusively during her tenure as secretary of state.
The FBI in recent weeks has been looking into the security of the so-called “homebrew” server Clinton had set up to house her private email account. Clinton’s attorney agreed last week to turn over the server as well as a thumb drive containing additional copies of the former secretary of state’s work emails.
NBC News reported earlier Tuesday that the FBI was confident it could retrieve some information from the server despite an apparent attempt to wipe the server clean, citing two anonymous sources familiar with the process.
After a town hall event in Las Vegas, Fox News’ Ed Henry pressed the Democratic presidential front-runner on that point.
“Did you wipe the server?” Henry asked.
“What, like with a cloth or something?” Clinton joked. “Well, no. I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”
Clinton’s campaign previously said the candidate deleted emails she considered personal in the course of reviewing her emails to turn over to the State Department. Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, wrote in a March letter to to the House Select Committee on Benghazi that “there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com emails from Secretary of State Clinton’s tenure on the server for any review, even if such a review were appropriate or legally authorized.” It’s not clear from Kendall’s letter when those emails were deleted, although he wrote that Clinton had requested the private email account, which was no longer active, be set to retain only the last 60 days of messages.
Clinton emphasized her campaign’s cooperation with federal agencies amid the email fracas, reiterating that the server already had been handed over to the FBI.
“They can do whatever they want to with the server to figure out what’s there and what’s not there,” she said. “That’s for the people investigating it to try to figure out. But we turned over everything that was work related. Every single thing.”
In responding to Henry’s questions, the former secretary of state also argued that questions about the handling of sensitive information in connection with her email account would have been raised even if she’d used a government, rather than a private, address. She cast the inquiries into her private email account as a disagreement between the State Department and other agencies over whether certain information should be marked classified in retrospect.
“That has nothing to do with me,” she insisted.
Clinton walked away from the podium after the exchange with Henry. A reporter shouted after her “is this an indication that this issue isn’t going to go away?”
“Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys,” she responded.
Watch below via Real Clear Politics:
“With a cloth”. That’s funny and some good trolling. But… she better come out clean on this one very soon or she is toast. I think it is much ado about nothing, but most folks understand about sensitive emails even if they know nothing about the classification system. That being said, most folks also don’t like being lied to (if that is the case), on a national level… even for trivial things. Just seems so “small ball”. But the meta here is still not good.
This is a great ado about nothing, of course. But Hillary isn’t helping herself with these snarky little comments
I thought it was funny. Obviously, the media has no sense of humor. Also, Henry is an ass wipe. LOL.
No one is talking to her about this other than stenographer jackals of the media, The Right and hand-wringing Democrats (mostly in the Beltway).
Who can blame her for hating the media. They all suck out loud.