NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell admitted on Tuesday that she did not ask Hillary Clinton as many questions as she wanted about her email controversy last week, because she worried Clinton’s handlers would cut off the discussion prematurely.
“One of the issues is we were told we had a 15 minute interview,” Mitchell said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday. “I asked more than 12 minutes on emails before I felt, out of concern that they would cut it off, obviously, that I had to move on.”
“So, I couldn’t ask everything that I did want to ask,” she added. “But I think we did get a good chance to ask a lot of questions and discover that she did not have an answer for why she did the personal server in the first place.”
After spending 12 minutes on the emails, Mitchell spent about 18 more minutes last Friday asking Clinton more generally about the 2016 race for the White House, including the possibility of Vice President Joe Biden jumping in to compete for the Democratic nomination.
A spokesman for Clinton’s campaign did not return a request for comment from the Washington Examiner media desk about Mitchell’s comments.
In the interview, Clinton would not apologize for relying exclusively on a nongovernment email server during her tenure as secretary of state, even as federal authorities have found that at least some of her electronic communications included sensitive government information. She did, however, say she was “sorry that this has been confusing to people.”
Sunday night, the New York Times reported that a government review found that two emails Clinton received while she was head of the State Department “contained highly classified information.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski criticized the Clinton campaign on Tuesday for failing to be fully transparent.
“You know this game,” Brzezinski said to Mitchell. “You saw the game getting played. You watched it right before your eyes, [Clinton] trying to sort of answer and then more information coming out over Labor Day weekend. What is that? We all know this. Are we going to pretend that didn’t happen?”
Clinton is reportedly set to do more national news interviews in the coming weeks. ABC News announced Tuesday that she participated in one with the network in the morning and it will air on “World News Tonight.”
