Sen. Claire McCaskill on Thursday defended Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email to conduct official business by saying the then-secretary of state wanted “privacy.”
“She’s admitted this was a mistake. I think we need to realize she wasn’t trying to undermine the United States of America, she was trying to protect her privacy,” the Missouri Democrat said on MSNBC.
Sen. McCaskill, who has endorsed her former Senate colleague’s campaign for the presidency, said Clinton was “probably misguided,” but speculated that she wanted “some free space of privacy” after being “under attack her entire life.”
Sen. McCaskill said if she were Clinton’s campaign adviser, “I would probably tell her to spend a lot more time talking about this buffoon” to help put this controversy behind her, in an apparent reference to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
She claimed Clinton “turned in all her emails,” a fact disputed by an MSNBC host, and also argued that because some received messages from Clinton’s personal email address, her usage was “not a secret.”
The State Department’s inspector general released a report on Wednesday that said there is “no evidence” Clinton had requested or received approval to use her “personal email account to conduct official business.”
Despite Clinton’s previous claims to the contrary, the report stated that she would not received permission as private servers pose “significant security risks.”
McCaskill admitted the results of the inspector general’s report are “not great,” but said the investigation “wasn’t about classified material, it was about record keeping.”
“I think the fact that she keeps saying … ‘I will sit down with the FBI’ shows that this isn’t somebody who is trying to hide something.” Clinton and her aides declined to be interviewed for the inspector general’s report.
