A combative Hillary Clinton insisted Tuesday that the process of the intelligence community’s review of her email “has nothing to do with the fact that the account was personal,” and she declined to answer questions about whether she attempted to wipe her personal server before handing it over to officials.
“It has nothing to do with me, and it has nothing to do with the fact that my account was personal,” she told reporters after an event in North Las Vegas, Nevada, arguing that the government would be engaged in a review process of her emails even if she had exclusively used a government account during her tenure as Secretary of State and then moved to make her correspondence public.
“If it was a government account and I’d said ‘release it,’ we’d be having the same argument,” she said.
"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," she said.
Asked if she wiped her personal server before handing it over to investigators, Clinton responded “Like, with a cloth or something?”
“I don’t know how it works digitally at all,” she said.
She added that her personal emails are “my personal business” but that her team handed over 55,000 pages of “anything we thought could be work-related” from her server.
“Under the law, that decision is made by the official,” she added. “I was the official. I made those decisions.”
On Tuesday, sources with knowledge of the FBI’s investigation of the security of Clinton’s personal email server told NBC News that the agency is optimistic that it may be able to recover at least some data from the server.
The team of intelligence community reviewers also looking at the emails have identified 305 documents that have been referred to their agencies for further consultation.
Clinton has consistently maintained that she never sent nor received classified information on her private email server. Her campaign has said that, because a growing number of agencies are reviewing her correspondence, disputes about what should and should not be considered classified are inevitable.
Asked as she left the press gaggle if she’s concerned that the issue of her email server is not going to go away for her campaign, she shrugged.
“Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys,” she said.
