Clinton repeatedly said she did not have any classified information whatsoever in her email, marked or unmarked. Critics quickly coined the hashtag #WhatMakesHillaryShortCircuit. If there is one subject on which Clinton should have a decent, well-prepared explanation, it is that of her email server.
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As New York Times public editor Liz Spayd has written, Clinton’s answers were in the Fox News interview were “misleading, bordering on false”.
Clinton attributed the confusion to miscommunication, explaining that she had meant to say that her statements in public were no different than those she had made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
But all of that seemed to go out the window during a press event in Washington DC hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists – the first press conference Clinton has held in almost a year. “Despite her calls for the press to hold candidates accountable, there’s no doubt Hillary Clinton is desperate to avoid a taste of her own medicine”. But he has also questioned the accuracy of some of the public statements she’s made about the issue.
“He came out and said, ‘She lied – lied, lied, lied”, he said.
In July, Comey said FBI investigators found that 113 emails from Clinton’s server contained classified information that had been secret at the time it was sent or received.
“The Republican nominee is vehemently anti-immigrant, but there is nothing like winning to change people’s minds”, she said.
As I have previously written, whether information contains classification markings is irrelevant, because Clinton signed a nondisclosure agreement with the State Department that said classified information was still classified regardless whether it contained specific markings. “I view the political landscape as increasingly favorable to us making this happen”.
More than seven months since her last formal press conference, the former secretary of State addressed a room full of journalists and took a few questions.
In the wake of all the Pinocchios, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Clinton on Friday if she was “mischaracterizing Director Comey’s testimony, and is this not undercutting your efforts to rebuild trust with the American people?” She spoke at the event for about 10 minutes before taking questions from a selected panel at the conference.
REP. TREY GOWDY, (R), SC (from July 7, 2016 congressional hearing): Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her e-mails, either sent or received. “There is no classified material”.
CLINTON: I never sent or received anything that was marked classified.
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In fact, she said, two out of the three emails sent with some level of classified markings on them “were later explained by the State Department not to have been in any way confidential at the time that they were delivered”. It was perhaps because she did not herself know the real scope of the investigation, or because she believed that she might have unwittingly flouted federal protocols when sharing information with her aides, or may be even because Clinton knew that she had committed a crime (s), but whatever the reasons might have been, Hillary Clinton desperately attempted to evade all questions about the emails during the nominating process. But Director Comey said there was absolutely no intention on my part to either ignore or in any way dismiss the importance of those documents, because they weren’t marked classified.
