John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, offered a new explanation for why the Democratic front runner made a controversial joke last week about wiping her email server down with a cloth.
“I think she was…she’s clearly not a technical expert,” Podesta told reporters at a clean energy conference in Nevada Monday. He also tried to explain the flap by saying that Clinton “was reacting to the badgering she was getting from a Fox reporter.”
During a press conference in Las Vegas last week, Clinton was asked whether she instructed anyone to wipe information from the mysterious private email server she maintained as secretary of state.
“Like with a cloth or something?” she responded to Fox News’ Ed Henry, making a wiping motion with her hand. The response was seen as too flippant given that Clinton was forced to hand her server over to the FBI earlier this month after two “top secret” emails were found to have traversed it.
Clinton and her team have avoided numerous questions surrounding her use of the server, which was housed in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y. home when she was secretary of state. After she left office, Clinton hired a Denver-based IT firm to manage the server. The company transferred it to a data center in New Jersey in June 2013.
It is still unclear, however, what Clinton and her team did with emails that were maintained on the server.
Clinton’s attorney stated in March that the server had been wiped clean of its information. But the Clinton team has not said whether any of Clinton’s emails were transferred to a backup server. Clinton has also declined to say when the server was wiped clean and why that step was undertaken.
Podesta maintained the campaign’s evasive posture Monday.
Asking by a reporter whether Clinton had a second email server, the longtime Clinton insider said only that, “I think the questions around this are many, but I think she’s tried to answer them all.”
Clinton’s email server cloth quip isn’t her first failed joke about the email scandal, which is reportedly causing growing concern among Clinton’s allies.
“By the way, you may have seen that I have recently launched a Snapchat account,” Clinton said earlier this month at a campaign event in Iowa. “I love it — those messages disappear all by themselves.” (RELATED: Hillary Touts Snapchat Because ‘Those Messages Disappear All By Themselves’)
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