Hillary Clinton thinks it’s laughable to suggest that hackers may have taken advantage of her controversial private State Department email server.
The former secretary of state was moved to merriment Thursday afternoon when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked her to respond to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggesting this week that Clinton may have compromised State Department secrets with her private server.
“There’s no evidence of that,” she laughed in her first live interview of the 2016 presidential campaign. “Again, this is overheated rhetoric, baseless charges, trying to somehow gain a footing in the debate and the primary. And it really doesn’t deserve any comment.”
Clinton’s email scandal has dogged her campaign since it first launched in April, and it’s starting to take a toll on her approval ratings.
She eventually apologized for using an unauthorized server when she worked at the State Department, saying in an interview last week with ABC News that it “was a mistake.”
“I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility,” she told David Muir in a “World News Tonight” interview.
Her belated apology came shortly after she said in separate media interviews that she had nothing to apologize for.
“[W]hat I did was allowed,” Clinton told the Associated Press, claiming that everything she did was permissible under State Department regulations.
Prior to her AP interview, the closest that Clinton had come to saying sorry for using a private server was to apologize for causing confusion.
“At the end of the day, I am sorry that this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions, but there are answers to all these questions,” Clinton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “And I take responsibility and it wasn’t the best choice.”
Clinton said she first started using personal email accounts when she served as a U.S. senator. She simply continued the practice when she eventually started working in the State Department.
“I did all my business on my personal email [in the Senate],” she said. “I was not thinking a lot when I got in [to the State Department]. There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world. I didn’t really stop and think what kind of email system will there be.”
“This was fully above board, people knew I was using a personal email, I did it for convenience. I sent emails that I thought were work-related to people’s .gov accounts,” she added.
Upon exiting the State Department, Clinton directed her team to wipe more than 30,000 allegedly “personal” messages from her email server. State Department officials were not given the chance to determine whether the now-deleted emails were “personal” or whether they contained sensitive information.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has since launched a criminal investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server, and agents are looking to determine whether the former secretary of state either sent or received classified information.
Clinton eventually surrendered her server to federal investigators, but it was reported later that the item she turned over to inspectors was blank and contained no information. Depending on what the FBI finds in its investigation, further criminal charges could be brought against Clinton.
