Hillary Clinton’s press secretary claimed Thursday that he’s not sure what people mean when they say the former secretary of State “wiped” her private State Department email server.
His admission came during an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar.
Upon Clinton’s exit at the State Department, she directed her team to “wipe” her server clean of roughly 30,000 allegedly “personal” emails. State Department officials were not given a chance to review whether these emails were indeed “personal.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has since launched a criminal investigation into whether Clinton sent or received classified information over her private server. Depending on what federal investigators find, there could be a further criminal investigation.
The Justice Department has Clinton’s server, Brian Fallon assured Keilar, referring to a blank server Clinton’s aides turned over to federal investigators in August
“I don’t know what the FBI is going to do with it —” he started.
“The wiped server,” the CNN anchorwoman clarified, reminding viewers that the server turned over to the Department of Justice is totally blank. “The wiped server, right Brian?”
There was a slight pause. “I don’t know what wiped means,” he said.
She clarified, “The emails were deleted.”
“The emails were deleted,” he conceded, adding later, “I’m not sure what point you’re making.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Keilar explained that she simply wanted to know why Clinton had ordered the permanent deletion of thousands of emails.
“Many legal experts say that if you’re facing scrutiny, you don’t delete emails,” she said. “That’s really the question that I sort of want to get at here.”
“She provided 55,000 pages of emails,” Brian Fallon responded. “It’s true that she provided them in hard copy. That’s what the law required. If the State Department had asked for to be provided them electronically, we would’ve done that. The law required them to be provided in paper form. She made the decision after that to not retain those [electronic copies].”
“Why?” the CNN anchor asked.
“It wasn’t kept on the server, Brianna, but a copy was kept by a personal attorney —” he started.
Keilar interjected, “Why didn’t’ she keep them on the server?”
“I don’t know what the pertinence of that would’ve been,” he answered.
The CNN interview comes on the heels of former Clinton aide Bryan Pagliano telling congressional investigators this week that he will invoke the Fifth Amendment in order to avoid answering questions about his former employer.
As a former State Department IT staffer, Pagliano helped set up Clinton’s private server.
At a press conference in August, Clinton joked about “wiping” her server with a cloth. In response to a question about the deleted emails, Clinton said, “I have no idea, that’s why we turned it over.”
When pressed to respond again to question about “wiping” her server, she joked, “What, like with a cloth or something?”
“I don’t know how it works at all,” she added.
