Donald Trump lashed out at the moderators during Sunday night’s second presidential debate for failing to ask Hillary Clinton any questions about her email scandal.
“I’d like to know, Anderson, why aren’t you bringing up the emails?” Trump said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, one of the debate moderators.
While Clinton was asked a direct question about whether she agreed with the FBI’s conclusion that she had been “extremely careless” in her treatment of classified material, it had been posed by Martha Raddatz of ABC News.
Trump accused the moderators and Clinton of forcing him to play “one on three” by debating against Raddatz, Cooper and Clinton simultaneously.
“It hasn’t been finished at all,” he said of the emails as the moderators attempted to steer the conversation elsewhere.
Trump seized on Clinton’s email controversy Sunday, telling the Democratic nominee she would “be in jail” if he was the president.
“I didn’t think I’d say this but I’m going to say it and I hate to say it, but if I win I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception, there has never been anything like it,” Trump said.
The Republican nominee ticked through a list of findings from the FBI’s year-long investigation of Clinton’s email use, such as her staff’s use of a free digital deletion tool called BleachBit to scrub emails from her server, and the disappearance of two boxes of printed emails at the outset of the State Department’s inquiry into Clinton’s missing records.
“You get a subpoena and after you get a subpoena, you delete 33,000 emails and then you acid-wash them or bleach them, as you would say, a very expensive process,” Trump said. He argued that others have seen their lives destroyed for “one-fifth” of what Clinton did.
The former secretary of state dismissed Trump’s tirade as a series of lies.
“Everything he just said is absolutely false, but I’m not surprised,” Clinton said. “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law.”
“Because you’d be in jail,” Trump said, a line that drew applause from the audience at Washington University in St. Louis.
Clinton went on to apologize for her private email use, admitting that she erred by hosting classified information on an unauthorized server in her basement.
“That was a mistake, and I take responsibility for using a personal email account,” she said. “I’m not making any excuses.”
During the first presidential debate, Trump did not push the email controversy aggressively, a move that disappointed many Republicans.
