Hillary Clinton gave a press conference in Las Vegas that mostly focused on her email server yesterday; she didn’t provide much new information on the subject except to make clear that she’s tired of talking about it. Clinton ended the questioning abruptly, noting, “Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys,” before she walked away.
She said earlier of the server that “this didn’t turn out to be convenient at all and I regret that this has become such a cause célèbre … I know there’s a certain level of, you know, sort of anxiety or interest in this, but the facts are the facts.” She insisted that she never sent or received any materials marked as classified; the government is currently going through her emails looking for materials that may have been classified when sent, and 305 emails have been flagged for further review.
When not speaking to the press, she’s started to make jokes about the emails — or blames the whole never-ending episode on partisanship. At the annual Iowa Democratic Wing Ding on Friday, she said, “[Y]ou may have seen that I have recently launched a Snapchat account. I love it — those messages disappear all by themselves.” Clinton told Telemundo on Tuesday, “Look, I’ve been around a long time. I know when they can’t beat you on the issues, when they can’t beat you on your experience … they’re going to come up with something, and you just have to keep smiling and go through it.”
Meanwhile, the FBI is looking at the server itself, and trying to find out if any secret information that could have been sent using the email system was accessed by hackers. When asked whether the served had been wiped — with all the personal emails on there erased thoroughly — she replied, “What, like with a cloth or something? … I don’t know how it works at all.” It’s not clear if the tens of thousands of erased emails are still accessible to federal agents; Platte River Services, the Colorado company that dealt with Clinton’s private server, told ABC News that it was “highly likely” a backup copy of the server was made. A cybersecurity expert told Business Insider that the fact Clinton’s IT firm was not “a cleared contractor is largely irrelevant, since they were handling what should have been unclassified email.” That would change if classified emails were in fact sent.
The longevity of this issue has clearly frustrated the Clinton campaign, still miles ahead in the Democratic primary polls. A longtime adviser told the Washington Post, “They’re worried about it. They don’t know where it goes. That’s the problem.”
The State Department is still sifting through the remainder of the 55,000 pages of emails that have not yet been released to the public; the next batch will come out later this month.
