Clinton Spokesman: ‘I Don’t Know What Wiped Means’ (Updated)

Keilar pressed Fallon about why the former secretary of state deleted personal emails from her server, and the two had an exchange about the propriety of deleting those emails.

“Why didn’t she keep them on the server?” Keilar asked.

“I don’t know what the relevance, the pertinence of that would have been,” Fallon replied. “She did keep a copy, an electronic copy in the possession of her lawyer.” Fallon added that the State Department initially provided the so-called relevant emails in paper copy and then later Clinton lawyer David Kendall delivered them to the Justice Department in digital form.

“Just to be clear, Brian, this is an electronic copy that I imagine is a PDF form that David Kendall retained or is this the actual e-mail with the metadata on it?” Keilar pressed. Fallon said the Justice Department also has possession of the Clinton server. “I don’t know what the FBI is going to do with it but they very well may seek to perform any kind of operation on it,” Fallon said. Keilar interrupted to clarify. “The wiped server?” she said. “The wiped server, right, Brian?”

“I don’t know what ‘wiped’ means,” Fallon responded. “The e-mails were deleted.”

What Keilar was pushing for was an answer to the question of whether or not the authorities had possession of the actual digital email files with attached metadata—the kind of data that might be able to determine when, how, and who might have deleted any emails. Finally, Fallon admitted the emails held by the Justice Department did not have the metadata.

Watch the whole exchange below:

Last month, when Clinton herself refused to answer questions about whether the server was wiped (meaning all the data on it was deleted), Fallon took to Twitter to confirm that the server was “empty.” See his tweet below:

Update: Jason Beale, a pseudonymous former CIA interrogator who has spoken out in defense of enhanced interrogation techniques, offered an extensive analysis of how Fallon answered CNN’s questions: