Hillary Clinton sort of apologized for her private email server use, but the Republican National Committee panned it as the “byproduct of an intense round of focus grouping – not remorse for putting our national security at risk.”
As her favorability poll numbers have taken a steep dive, Clinton sat down with ABC News to say “obviously I don’t like hearing that.”
“I am confident by the end of this campaign people will know they can trust me. And that I will be on their side and will fight for them and their families. But I do think I could have and should have done a better job answering questions earlier,” she said.
“I really didn’t perhaps appreciate the need to do that. What I had done was allowed, it was above board. But in retrospect, certainly, as I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should’ve used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related emails.”
Clinton added using a private server “was a mistake.”
“I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility. And I’m trying to be as transparent as I possibly can to not only release 55,000 pages of my emails, turn over my server. But I am looking forward, finally, to testifying before Congress. Something I’ve been asking for nearly a year,” she said.
The former secretary of State is scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in open session on Oct. 22, where she’s guaranteed to be grilled before the cameras about her emails.
Clinton replied “I did, I did” when asked if she “made a mistake.”
“As I said, it was allowed and there was no hiding it. It was totally above board. Everybody in the government I communicated with — and that was a lot of people– knew I was using a personal e-mail. But I’m sorry that it has, you know, raised all of these questions. I do take responsibility for having made what is clearly not the best decision. And I want people to know that I am trying to be as transparent as possible so that, you know, legitimate questions can and will be answered,” she said.
Clinton refused to name who in the administration knew she was using private email.
“It appeared, you know, as my address. But I emailed two people on their .gov accounts. And that’s why I believed and I think it’s been proven to be accurate, that the vast majority of everything that I was emailing would be captured on the State Department system. Or on the government system that I emailed into,” she said, arguing that there’s still “dispute” over whether she passed classified information.
“I understand why different agencies have different views and I respect that. It does not change the fact that I did not send or receive any information that was marked classified at the time. Now, I know that it’s hard for people who haven’t been in these systems, perhaps, to understand exactly how this works. But in the State Department, you had an unclassified system So… even if I had used a government account on the State Department– government system and I had said I wanted emails released, we would be going through the same process.”
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