Hillary Clinton said Sunday that there was no contradiction between her claims that she did not send classified information from her private email server and the FBI’s findings that she did.
“[FBI] Director Comey said my answers were truthful,” Clinton told Fox News Sunday‘s Chris Wallace. “And what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.”
Clinton has continuously claimed that she neither sent nor received information “marked classified at the time.” A year-long FBI investigation found that the former secretary of state transmitted dozens of emails that contained classified material, including some at the highest level of classification.
Those emails, Clinton reiterated, were marked classified retroactively, but were not marked classified at the time.
“I was communicating with over 300 people in my emailing. They certainly did not believe and had no reason to believe that what they were sending was classified,” Clinton said. “In retrospect, different agencies come in and say, well, it should have been, but that’s not what was happening in real time.”
The FBI also found that Clinton and her team had been “extremely careless” in how they handled “sensitive, highly classified information.”
Clinton said Sunday that while her use of a private server was “a mistake,” she was relying on the judgment of “the professionals with whom I worked.”
“Maybe some people are saying, well, among those 300 people they made the wrong call,” she said. “At the time, there was no reason in my view to doubt the professionalism and the determination by the people who work every single day on behalf of our country.”
