Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton dodge a question asking her to explain a newly discovered email chain between the former secretary of state and then-commander of U.S. Central Command David Petraeus.
The Benghazi-related emails had not been disclosed to the House committee as Clinton had sworn under oath all work related emails had been.
Host Chuck Todd asked, “You had said in a written statement under oath that you turned over everything you believed you had for the federal words those 55,000 e-mails but we have now discovered an e-mail chain between then general Petraeus and yourself that took place a couple of months before these records started. Can you explain the discrepancy there? It was the same e-mail address while at state that you were using with General Petraeus two months before you said everything was out there.”
Clinton answered, “Well, everything we had access to was certainly out there and the reason we know about the email chain with General Petraeus is because it was on a government server. So from my perspective we have a very thorough review process that we conducted and my attorneys supervised it, they went through everything and what we had available at the time was turned over.”
Todd continued, “I guess what I’m trying to figure out is if you said in March that the e-mail system began in March of ’09 but we have the same e-mail address popping up in January, explain that discrepancy.”
Clinton replied, “There was a transition period. I wasn’t that focused on my email account to be clear here.”
Todd continued, “Let me stop you there. you say you weren’t focused on it but this seemed to be — to put an email server at your house is not a — it’s a complicated thing.”
Clinton said, “Yeah, but it was already there. It had been there for years. it is the system that my husband’s personal office used when he got out of the White House so it was sitting there in the basement. It was not any trouble at all. I know there are a lot of people who are questioning that but the fact is that it was there. I added my account to it. It took a little time to do that, so there was about a month where I didn’t have everything on the server. We went back and tried to recover whatever we could recover. It’s also fair to say that there are some things about that that I can’t control. I can’t control the team aspects of it. I’m not a technical expert. I relied on people who were and we have done everything we could in response to the State Department asking us to do this review because they asked all the former secretaries. The reason they asked is because they found gaps in their own record keeping. My assumption — because this system was there before I became secretary, it was there when I left — my assumption anything that I sent to a dot-gov account would be captured.”
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