A spokesman for the State Department said Tuesday that he does not know if Hillary Clinton’s private email server was breached by hackers.
Mark Toner also declined to say at a daily press conference who at the agency agreed to allow Clinton to operate a personal email account hosted on a home-brew server when she became secretary of state in 2009.
The series of questions comes a day after the State Department released the largest batch of Clinton’s work-related emails so far. The 7,100 page tranche is also the first released since the FBI commandeered Clinton’s private server after the intelligence community inspector general found that two “top secret” emails had traversed it.
“Is the State Department confident that nobody breached the Secretary’s private server?” a reporter asked Toner.
“I don’t have an answer for you on that,” Toner replied, stumbling over his words before concluding: “I don’t know.”
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While Clinton has maintained that her email server was never breached, many observers and intelligence community veterans have cast doubt on that claim — especially given the sophistication of Russian and Chinese hackers.
Toner was also pressed repeatedly on another question that has yet to be answered in the Clinton email saga: which State Department officials agreed to allow Clinton use her off-the-books email server?
Asked who okayed the arrangement, Toner said: “My unsatisfactory but necessary answer to that is, you know, again that’s not our role in this process to really answer that question publicly. There are reviews and investigations underway that will look at possibly some of these issues, it is for other entities to speak to.”
He then indicated that he does not personally know who signed off on Clinton’s setup. But he said that it was known among many people at the State Department that Clinton had a personal email account.
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Asked a final time if he knew who had approved Clinton’s server, Toner again demurred and hinted that he was avoiding the question because “other entities” are looking into the issue.
“I don’t personally, but I don’t think it’s necessarily our responsibility to say that. I think that that’s for other entities to look at.”
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Toner was also asked about the State Department’s decision to upgrade hundreds of Clinton emails to “confidential,” the lowest classification category, before being released.
The agency’s talking points have stayed in line with the Clinton camp’s: the Democrat has said that she did not send or receive classified information at the time it was originated.
But many have pointed out that the nature of the emails which include the now-classified information indicate that the topics under discussion would have more likely been classified at the time of origin rather than five or six years after the fact.
Regardless, Toner reiterated the State Department’s claim that the now-classified information was not considered as such when it traversed Clinton’s email account.