With her poll numbers declining and controversies over her private email account mounting, Hillary Clinton may be apologetic, but on Meet the Press on Sunday, Clinton again displayed a sense of indifference towards the scandal.
The former Secretary of State again acknowledged that using a private email account was a mistake, but then went on to dismiss new revelations that showed discrepancies about her public statement on the matter.
“[O]f course I take responsibility. It was my choice. It was a mistake back when I did it. And I'm trying to do the best I can to answer all of the questions that people have,” Clinton said to Chuck Todd. But she quickly undercut it by speaking with a sense of utter nonchalance.
“Whatever happened to them, happened to them,” she said about the work emails she apparently hadn’t turned over to the State Department, despite assurances that she had turned over all work emails. And as for why the Defense Department found private emails between her and a top general in January and March of 2009 when she previously said she began using her private account in mid-March 2009, she said she “wasn’t that focused” on the matter back then.
And even as his wife was trying to apologize for the scandal, Bill Clinton was undercutting the apology by dismissing the story entirely. “I have never seen so much expended on so little,” the former president said in a CNN interview to air Sunday.
“The other party doesn’t want to run against her. And if they do, they’d like her as mangled up as possible,” Bill Clinton added. “There are lots of people who wanted there to be a race for different reasons. And they thought the only way they could make it a race was a full-scale frontal assault on her. And so this email thing became the biggest story in the world.”
“It is like a drip, drip, drip,” Hillary Clinton said Sunday, acknowledging that it has cost her in the polls.
The Pentagon recently found an email chain between Clinton and then-commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. David Petraeus from early 2009—emails which were apparently not turned over by Clinton, despite her having said she had given all of her work emails to the State Department.
Clinton countered that her attorneys had done an exhaustive review of her emails to separate work emails to hand over and private emails that were not appropriate to hand over—a process she inexplicably didn't participate in.
“Whatever happened to them, happened to them,” Clinton said. “We have a very thorough review process that we conducted… what we had available at the time was turned over.”
The emails between Clinton and Petraeus were in January and February of 2009, although Clinton had previously stated that she started using her personal account in mid-March, 2009.
“There was a transition period. I wasn’t that focused on my email account, to be clear here,” Clinton said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’ Clinton said that the private server she began using for her work emails in 2009 "had been [in her home] for years. It is the system that my husband’s personal office used when he got out of the White House. It was sitting there in the basement. It was not any trouble at all.”
Clinton insisted that she had “done all that I can to take responsibility, to be as transparent as possible” and said it was “totally ridiculous” to suggest she set up the email server was to make it more difficult to access under the Freedom of Information Act.
