Some of the largest newsrooms in the nation were hesitant to press Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton for answers on her State Department email scandal in the days leading up to the Iowa caucus.
NBC News, for example, avoided the topic entirely Monday morning as Clinton joined Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie to ask her about her strategy for winning caucus states. They also asked Clinton to explain how she differentiates herself from her chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and if she woke up “excited” for the first day of voting in the 2016 Democratic primary.
News broke last week that the State Department found 22 emails containing top-secret information on an unauthorized, private server that Clinton used when she worked the top desk at Foggy Bottom. Federal authorities are trying to determine whether Clinton and her team used her private server to send or receive classified materials in the years that she worked at the State Department, and they are investigating whether she broke any laws in doing so.
CBS News touched on the topic briefly, but did so mostly to give Clinton time to respond to ads from the Sanders campaign that have raised questions about her State Department emails.
“The Sanders campaign has gotten more negative and more personal, which I regret because I thought we were running a really good campaign based on the issues, what we would do and how we would do it,” she told CBS New on Monday.
ABC News, for its part, previewed the Iowa caucus Sunday evening by featuring a segment that soft-pedaled the email scandal, and another that touted an “exclusive” first look at a new phone app rolled out by Clinton’s campaign.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” meanwhile downplayed Clinton’s email scandal when chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell assured a panel that the Democratic front-runner faced no real legal problems.
“Honestly, from my sources, and they go pretty high up including — including some of the people who are doing the review for the — inside the intelligence community,” Mitchell said Monday. “I don’t think there is the legal culpability here.”
CNN, however, did not shy away from the issue Monday morning as they pressed her repeatedly to comment on the issue.
“There is nothing new and I think the facts are quite helpful here,” Clinton told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, adding that reports she kept top secret information on her server amounted to little more than a “dispute about retroactive classification.”
Clinton also said that the scandal involving her emails is really the work of the Republican Party, which she said has launched a campaign full of “a lot of innuendo and a lot of attacks” on her, despite that fact she had “answered every question.”
The Democratic front-runner and her team have stated in the past that she never mishandled classified information. They are now saying today that the issue is about “over-classification run amok.”
