Following her town hall event in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton was challenged by skeptical reporters to explain her email arrangement, and once again she insisted that everything she did while secretary of State was “legally permitted.”
Clinton also refused to say if she knew that her email server, which was turned over to the FBI last week, had been wiped clean of data.
Fox New’s Ed Henry asked Clinton if she plans on taking responsibility for her email scandal rather than making jokes about Snapchat and blaming Republicans.
“Isn’t leadership about taking responsibility?” he asked.
Clinton, sounding defensive, answered, “Look, I take responsibility. Look, I just told Jeff, in retrospect, this didn’t turn out to be convenient at all and I regret that this has become such a cause celebre. But this does not change the facts and no matter what anybody tries to say, the facts are stubborn.”
Clinton went on to say that everything she did was “legally permitted” and that she turned over the 55,000 emails “out of an abundance of an attempt to be helpful.”
“I know there is a certain level of anxiety or interest in this,” Clinton said, “but the facts are the facts.”
And she took issue with allegations that there were classified emails on her server. “That is not in any way agreed upon,” she argued. “State Department disagrees.”
And she quadrupled down on her claim that she “did not send any classified material” and “did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified.”
Shortly after the press conference, an aide to a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee told the Daily Mail that Clinton’s claim “is beyond bizarre and entirely nonsensical.”
‘She was one of a few dozen people in Obama’s administration with the knowledge and experience to decide if something was top secret,’ the aide said after a promise of anonymity so he could speak his mind.
‘The way you decide if something is classified, when you’re the secretary of state, isn’t looking for a stamp. It’s looking at the contents. This is the worst buck-passing I’ve seen since Hillary’s husband decided there was more than one way to define the word “is”.’
The press conference took on a surreal tone when Henry asked Clinton about FBI reports that said she wiped her server clean and the Democrat frontrunner played dumb.
“Did you wipe the server?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” Clinton answered. “That’s why we turned it over.”
When pressed again if she wiped the server, Clinton shrugged and joked, “Like with a cloth or something?”
She refused to answer the question.
“In order to be as cooperative as possible, we have turned over the server,” Clinton said. “They can do whatever they want to with the server to figure out what’s there and what’s not there. That’s for the people investigating to try to figure out.”
The FBI said today that they are confident that they will be able to recover at least some of the information from Clinton’s private email server even though there was an attempt to wipe it clean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waPCT2cdPa8
Join the conversation as a VIP Member