Democrats may not care about Hillary Clinton's email scandal, but Americans do, GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio said Wednesday, because the matter goes right to the issue of the former Secretary of State's credibility.
"First of all it's pretty clear what she told us and what happened are two very different things," the Florida senator told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program. "Second it goes to the issue of confidence. These emails by the Secretary of State were the prime targets before an intelligence agency."
During Tuesday's Democratic primary debate, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drew big laughs when he told Clinton that Americans are "sick and tired" of hearing about her use of a private email server.
"As soon as the news came out that she was using a private server, one of the first things I said was those emails were vulnerable to the Chinese, the North Koreans, Iran, you name it," said Rubio. "The Russians, and of course that's now we're seeing reports that that was the case. So it shows that she was both incompetent, but quite frankly was not being truthful with the American people and playing games with words."
Rubio also criticized Clinton for defending the Obama administration and its decision to oust Muammar Qaddafi regime in Libya leading to the lethal attack on the 2012 consulate that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and other diplomatic personnel in Benghazi.
"Here's the bigger issue with Benghazi, we either should not have been there or we should have had a plan to rescue them, and in fact they got in trouble," said Rubio.
And a "confident" Secretary of State would have assured there were measures in place to safeguard diplomatic personnel, said Rubio, and "she didn't do that."
Meanwhile, Rubio said he believes the biggest threat to Clinton's candidacy is her "outdated ideas."
"If you watched that debate last night, it looked like something from the early '80s," he said. "It was basically a liberal versus liberal debate about who was going to give away the most free stuff. Free college education. Free college education for people illegally in this country. Free healthcare. Free everything."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.