Hillary Clinton clarified in an interview aired on CBS Sunday that when she says she’s sorry for conducting State Department business on her personal email server, she’s sorry about what came afterward.
“I’m sorry that I made a choice that has raised all of these questions, because I don’t like reading that people have questions about what I did and how I did it,” Clinton told Face the Nation.
“I’m proud of the work we did at the State Department. And I’m really proud of all the career professionals I worked with. I’m proud of the people who came in with me. And we got sanctions on Iran, put together that international coalition. We got a new arms treaty with Russia. We did a lot of really important work,” she said. “And I want that to be the focus of what people know about my tenure at the State Department.”
Acknowledging that she’ll be faced with questions next month in an open hearing before the House Select Committee on Benghazi — the terrorist attack that led to the discovery of her private server use — Clinton insisted she “never felt any political pressure or did I feel any political reason to do anything other than what we tried to do, which was to immediately deal with the problems that were coming at us.”
“There were two things going on simultaneously. I and others said that we were attacked. There was no doubt about that. That video, which was still spinning through the world, was being mentioned on social media. We had people climbing the walls at our embassy in Cairo even before the attack in Benghazi,” she said.
“And we had a lot of other attacks. I had to call the president of one of our neighboring countries, Tunis, to try to get — in Tunis — to get them to help protect our embassy. So, I was worried about everything that was going on and how people were responding to that from North Africa to Pakistan, all the way to Indonesia.”
On the server, the Democratic presidential candidate claimed, she’s now being “as transparent as possible, more than anybody else ever has been.”
Clinton also chimed in on the congressional Planned Parenthood defunding effort, saying the undercover videos of body-part brokering were “misleadingly edited” and were “intentionally taken out of context.”
“I have seen excerpts from them. And I have certainly read about them,” she said. “…But so far as I am aware, what they did, despite the way it was portrayed, is within the laws that were set up for this.”
The former senator, secretary of State and first lady also said she should be consider as an “outsider” in a campaign season where voters are shunning Washington “insiders.”
“I cannot imagine anyone being more of an outsider than the first woman president,” Clinton said. “I mean, really, let’s think about that.”
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