CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash said that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state feeds the narrative that “she thought she was above the rules.”
Appearing on CNN’s “At This Hour With Berman and Bolduan” on Wednesday, Bash called Clinton’s use of a private email server and a private email account while secretary of state an “unforced error.”
“This is something that Hillary Clinton and many, many, many people who I talk to who support her just wring their hands and say ‘What were you thinking?'” she said. (RELATED: State Department IG: Clinton Mishandled Emails, Posed Cybersecurity Risk)
“This feeds directly into the narrative that her opponents, Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side and ultimately Republicans led by Donald Trump in a general election will be hammering her on,” Bash continued. “And in politics, it is the existing narrative and ability by opponents to feed into that, that is the most damaging. We’ve seen that time and time again.”
“You’re hearing Donald Trump … calling her ‘crooked Hillary,'” she noted. “The fact she didn’t comply with the rules, that she appears to have been doing things that were not — maybe she thought she was above the rules or she’s different from the way everybody else should be. Now, she has lots of explanations, lots of ways that she’s trying to say that she did what she thought was right, but at the end of the day when you have an independent investigation going on within the department that she ran saying that she shouldn’t have done several things, including taking her documents and then not giving them back for almost two years after she left, that’s going to help her opponents in a big way.”