Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., is not buying into the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
“What this has turned into is just a good, old-fashioned political witch hunt,” the Missouri senator said Sunday morning in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”
Clinton, the front runner in the Democratic presidential primary, “was not the first secretary of state to use personal email, but she’s the only one that has turned over tens upon thousands of her emails and asked them to become public,” McCaskill said. “Now she’s turned over her server.”
Clinton has come under increasing scrutiny in recent days following the news that the FBI is investigating the transmission of classified information on the server. McCaskill dismissed the possibility that classified information went through Clinton’s server, saying that the emails may have only been marked as classified later, or that they contained only trivial information.
The show’s host, Martha Raddatz, challenged her on that point, asking if it was the secretary of state’s responsibility to know which information was classified, and noting that others, including former CIA director David Petraeus, have been prosecuted for similar conduct.
“This is just a lot of political partisan smoke,” McCaskill responded.
She also discounted the Select Committee on Benghazi, formed to investigate the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, that discovered the existence of Clinton’s private server.
“This has become just a partisan — this is called a ‘Get Hillary Clinton’ committee,” she said.
The questions surrounding Clinton’s time at the State Department and her emails are not going to derail her candidacy, McCaskill predicted.
“I think the American people get what this is. I think they know that she has a record of being a fighter,” she said. “She’s going to fight through this primary, she’s going to win this nomination.”
