Hillary Clinton over the weekend said that had she not asked for her emails to be released, the debate going on today about them wouldn't exist, drawing derision from the
MSNBC "Morning Joe" panel, including the show's liberal co-host, Mika Brzezinski.
"I wish that some of these politicians would stop thinking that the American people are so stupid," Brzezinski commented after reading an excerpt from an
op-ed in The Washington Post by Eugene Robinson, who called the former secretary of state "her own worst enemy."
In an Iowa radio interview, Clinton said she had sent "nothing marked classified" and that she thinks the issue will sort itself all out.
"If I had not asked for my emails all to be made public," Clinton said in the interview, "none of this would have been in the public arena. But I want people to know what we did. I'm proud of the four years that I was secretary of state. So I know this is all going to work itself out as we go forward."
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"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough said that the interview was "stunning" because "none of that is true. Everybody that's followed it for more than 10 seconds knows what she is saying is not true."
Further, he said he'd like to know if her excuse of partisan politics is the same thing she's telling the inspectors general for the Justice and State departments or the nation's intelligence agencies.
David Ignatius, an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post, said on the show that he believes people in the intelligence community are "genuinely upset" by Clinton's email server use.
"You have to remember, we just have had a CIA Director [David Petraeus], one of the most decorated generals in our modern history, who had to plead guilty to a criminal charge involving this question of unauthorized use of classified information," said Ignatius. "It's not a trivial issue.
"Secretary Clinton wandered into this with her email server and she has been scrambling over it ever since."
Like Robinson, Ignatius called Clinton's issues a "self-inflicted wound and she has nobody to blame for it but herself ... these are mistakes. They're serious mistakes, especially the ones involving classified information."
But for Clinton to apologize and do it convincingly, she'll have to do it soon, said Ignatius, but she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, "play by different rules."
"I think it's that sense of disrespect for the system that's animating a lot of the anger now," he said.
Bloomberg Politics Managing Editor Mark Halperin, also on the panel, said that he has seen a great deal of understanding and unease about Clinton's email issues, and the bigger problem will be for her to lock down the talk down the road.
"Two big things are going on," he said. "One is the FBI investigation. If they get their hand on her old emails, there could be problems related to national security and her credibility deciding what was personal and what was not."
Halperin predicted that there will soon be a legitimate hearing that could put Clinton in a politically tough position, and he does not believe Clinton's emails are completely lost, as there has to be at least one backup server.
"Of course, there were backups," he said. "You think Hillary Clinton had a server with emails coursing through it and no one backed it up? She decided not to keep them, but at some point someone must have been ordered to get rid of them."
But it all depends what the order was, whether the emails were to be deleted permanently so that they could never be recovered, said Halperin, and the question is whether the backups can be found.
NBC correspondent Chuck Todd, also on Tuesday's show, pointed out that the FBI's involvement was what changed the situation, and "made the difference between us in Washington and New York saying it, and her effectively a month ago being able to say 'This is you guys in the media that care about this. Voters don't.'
"That was true a month ago. The three letters — FBI — totally changed that."
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.
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