Bill Clinton said Wednesday that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a “smart girl” for largely avoiding email when she worked at the State Department.
“We know that Secretary Rice didn’t do emails. Smart girl,” he told a crowd in Las Vegas.
The former president also went on for some time making jokes about the email scandal that has dragged down Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers, and accused politicos and pundits of overreacting to the fact that his wife used private, unauthorized servers when she worked at the State Department.
“You know, for a year we were told, ‘This is the biggest problem since the end of World War II!'” the former president said Wednesday.
He then clutched his heart and imitated the sound of a person in shock.
“We know that what Hillary said about talking to Secretary [Colin] Powell about it was true,” Clinton continued.
“And we know that Secretary [John] Kerry did until the law changed. How come you only heard about Hillary? Well, for one thing, when everybody asked for disclosure, she disclosed!” he said.
Hillary Clinton said in December 2014 that she turned over more than 30,000 emails to the State Department. However, she also said at the time that she deleted roughly 32,000 emails from her private servers.
The former secretary of state and her team argued they deleted nearly half of the emails on her private servers because the messages were personal, and that they didn’t qualify as work-related.
Much of the FBI’s months-long investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server focused on recovering those deleted emails.
Though FBI Director James B. Comey recommended in July that no charges be brought against the former secretary of state, he also revealed his agency uncovered several troubling details, including that they “discovered several thousand work-related” notes among the trove of thousands of deleted emails.
“Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send email on that personal domain,” Comey said.
The FBI chief also said some of the deleted emails contained classified information, contrary to Clinton’s earlier claims.
“From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received,” he said.
Comey added elsewhere, “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
The FBI has sent “several thousand” of the recovered emails to the State Department, which will make the once-deleted notes available on a “rolling basis,” a government lawyer announced in August.
