Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton got testy and cracked another joke in an exchange with reporters after a town hall meeting in North Las Vegas Tuesday, repeatedly insisting she did not know if her private email server, which the FBI took control of last week, had been completely wiped clean of data.
After Fox News' Ed Henry repeatedly pressed Clinton on whether she had wiped all the emails from her home-brewed server, a visibly irritated Clinton finally answered, while miming the action of wiping something, "Like with a cloth of something?"
Henry then suggested, "You know how it works digitally," to which Clinton responded, "I don't know how it works digitally at all," reported the Washington Post.
Critics suggest Clinton is attempting to use humor to deflect the severity of the situation. Over the weekend, at the Wing Ding Dinner in Iowa, Clinton quipped about her fondness of the Snapchat phone application.
"You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account," she said.
"I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves," she added, donning a sly grin, reported ABC News.
Tuesday, Clinton went on to say that questions about the contents of the server should be asked to "the people investigating it to try and figure out," but didn't mention the FBI directly.
The FBI recently opened a criminal probe into Clinton's exclusive use of an unsecured private server during her tenure as secretary of state to see just how much classified data passed through the system and what the repercussions could be, fearing that numerous governments were able to hack the system and obtain the sensitive data. Last week, Clinton finally turned over the server to investigators after refusing to do so for months.
"In order to be as cooperative as possible, we have turned over the server," she said Tuesday, according to Breitbart. "They can do whatever they want to with the server to figure out what's there or what's not there. That's for the people investigating it to try to figure out. But we turned over everything that was work-related, every single thing. Personal stuff, we did not. I had no obligation to do so, and I did not."
Nearly two years after leaving the State Department, Clinton turned over about 30,000 work-related emails for record-keeping purposes, and unilaterally deleted an additional 30,000 that she deemed personal in nature, without any independent oversight. In late July, after reviewing a small sample of 40 of her emails, the inspector general of the intelligence community concluded she had sent at least four emails containing classified information while secretary of state, two of which had one of the highest classifications, reported the Wall Street Journal. Then, earlier this week, the State Department revealed it identified 60 more emails definitely containing classified data, and flagged 305 more for additional inspection, as previously reported by HNGN.
Clinton insisted Tuesday she didn't send or receive material that was marked or designated classified. "Whether it was a personal account or a government account, I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified, which is the way you know whether something is," she said. "What you are seeing now is a disagreement between agencies saying, you know what, they should of and the other saying, no they shouldn't That has nothing to do with me. If it has been a government account and I said released it, we would be having the same arguments."
Last week, Clinton submitted to a federal judge a statement signed under penalty of perjury declaring that she turned over all work-related emails, but the chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., told ABC Sunday that Clinton's statement is false because his committee already has 15 work emails that she did not turn over.
"I read that statement and if you read that statement, you'll know why people hate lawyers as much as they do. I don't read the statement that way, and I can't read the statement that way, because I know that to be false," said Gowdy, reported Breitbart. "Remember those 15 emails that Sidney Blumenthal gave our committee that she did not turn over to the State Department? All 15 of those related to her public records. So, we know for a fact, that she did not turn all over all records and all documents to the State Department. So, how she can represent that to a federal judge under oath, is something I suspect at some point that judge will ask her."
