Dateline Washington — Hillary Clinton acknowledged this afternoon that she may have “short-circuited” when she claimed in a recent interviews that FBI Director James Comey said she was “truthful” about her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Mrs. Clinton insisted in two televised interviews aired this week, including one with Fox News’s Chris Wallace aired Sunday, that Mr. Comey had found her statements “truthful” and “consistent” with what she has said publicly. The Democratic nominee, speaking at a joint convention for African-American and Hispanic journalists, remarked that she was “pointing out in both of those instances that Director Comey had said that my answers in my FBI interview were truthful.”
The former secretary of state reiterated the “truthful” assessment in an interview with a Colorado television station later in the week.
“That’s really the bottom line here,” she said today. “And I have said during the interview and many other occasions over the past months, that what I told the FBI, which he said was truthful, is consistent with what I have said publicly.
“So I may have short-circuited it and for that, I, you know, will try to clarify because I think, you know, Chris Wallace and I were probably talking past each other because of course, he could only talk to what I had told the FBI and I appreciated that.”
Mrs. Clinton repeated that her email practices represented a “mistake, and I take responsibility for that.”
“But I do think, you know, having him say that my answers to the FBI were truthful and then I should quickly add, what I said was consistent with what I had said publicly. And that’s really sort of in my view trying to tie both ends together,” she added.
During Mr. Comey’s July 7 testimony before the House Oversight Committee, the FBI director contradicted several of Mrs. Clinton’s public statements, including whether she had sent emails marked classified and whether there was, in fact, “classified material” on her server.
Asked about the inconsistency of three emails marked classified, Mrs. Clinton noted that Mr. Comey had testified that they were not appropriately marked.
“So, that leaves the 100 out of 30,000 emails that Director Comey testified contained classified information,” she said. “But again, he acknowledged there were no markings on those 100 emails.
“And so, what we have here is pretty much what I have been saying throughout this whole year and that is that I never sent or received anything that was marked classified.
“Now, if in retrospect, which is what is behind the 100 number — if in retrospect some different agency said, but it should have been, although it wasn’t, it should have been, that’s what the debate is about,” Mrs. Clinton continued. “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. So they would have been hard to do.
“And I will go back to where I started, I regret using one account. I’ve taken responsibility for that, but I’m pleased to be able to clarify and explain what I think the bottom line is on this.”
Donald Trump’s campaign laced into Mrs. Clinton over her latest “pretzel-like response.”
“Hillary Clinton’s habitual lying about the use of her secret server to send and receive classified, top secret information shows her blatant disregard for national security and a continued pattern of bad judgment,” senior communications adviser Jason Miller said in a statement.
“Clinton knows the actions she has taken are disqualifying for someone wishing to become commander-in-chief, and that is why today’s painful, pretzel-like response to a simple question about her illegal server was obvious to everyone watching.”
This story originated at www.politico.com
