An animated Bill Clinton on Saturday scoffed at the FBI’s investigation into his wife’s emails, calling it “a game” perpetuated by her political opponents.
“So everybody’s all breathless about this,” the former president said of the ongoing probe during a campaign stump speech in Kokomo, Ind.
“Look, this is a game,” he added.
As part of its “game,” the FBI has seized the former secretary of state’s private email server. The bureau is looking into whether classified information was mishandled by Clinton or any of her aides. Federal investigators are also poised to interview the main players, according to recent news reports.
Clinton asserted that his wife has been fully cooperative throughout the saga. But he also slipped up by acknowledging that the emails the former secretary of state sent while she was in office were the property of the State Department.
“She said, ‘they don’t belong to me, they belong to the State Department, but let them all go, I want people to see what we did all day,'” Clinton said.
Clinton left her post in Feb. 2013 but did not turn her work-related emails back over to the State Department until nearly two years later. She has still not explained why it took so long to relinquish the records, which were sent and received on the personal email address, HDR22@clintonemail.com.
Bill Clinton also used another false talking point that the campaign has uttered repeatedly throughout the email debacle.
“Nobody had ever done that before,” he said of the decision to hand the emails — more than 30,000 in all — back over to the State Department. “Now what are we supposed to do? We said you want to see, she said ‘fine, have them.'”
What Clinton conveniently left out was that while no other high-ranking government official has ever handed over thousands of pages of emails to their federal employer, none have ever exclusively used a personal email account hosted on a private email server which they kept in the basement of their private residence.
That’s what Clinton did during her entire tenure at State.
Clinton also complained about the decision to classify thousands of his wife’s emails. At least 22 have been deemed to contain “Top Secret” information. The Intelligence Community has determined that the information in at least one of those was classified at the time the email was originated. Dozens of other Clinton emails have been found to have “Secret” information. Thousands more have information that is classified at the lowest level, “Confidential.”
“They said ‘no, some of them should have been ‘Secret,'” Clinton lamented, before launching into an analogy comparing the classification of the emails to a traffic infraction.
“Now, you think about this when you go home,” he told the audience in Indiana.
“If you’re driving in a 50 mile-an-hour zone, and a police officer pulls you over when you’re driving 40, and says ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to give you a ticket because you know the speed limit here should be 35, and you should have known it,'” he said.
But that analogy does not hold up under scrutiny either.
As secretary of state, Clinton underwent training to identify classified information. She also signed a classified information non-disclosure agreement which required her to acknowledge that classified information can be marked or unmarked as such.
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