CNN Justice Reporter: Clinton Server Response ‘Not Enough of An Answer’

CNN Justice Reporter Evan Pérez argued that claims by the Hillary Clinton camp that they didn’t know information on her server was classified at the time it was sent is “not enough of an answer” on Friday’s “Wolf.”

Pérez said that while “a lot of the emails that we’re talking about, are perhaps a little bit more innocuous,” “there’s an Associated Press story this morning that talks about someone forwarding an email that includes a newspaper article, a news article, on drone strikes, and that program is covert, it’s completely forbidden to talk about it on — even on classified government email servers, not to mention private email servers, and that is considered, certainly by the CIA, certainly by the intelligence community, to be a violation. They don’t like that. They still consider that to be classified, just because something is published, doesn’t mean that it’s been unclassified. Now, she can’t really just get away with saying that those are the innocuous emails on this server, because we’re told that there are a lot of other emails that did have perhaps more serious information, and they’re more sensitive information, and so it doesn’t really explain this controversy.”

He added, “we’re told by people who’ve looked at this stuff certainly for months, the CIA, the Defense Department, the FBI have raised concerns, because they saw certain information that they believe should not be on this server. And that’s why it was inappropriate to have it in a private email setting, where it’s not protected by government security. And so, we are told that it ranges everything from, information that perhaps she was being used to prepare for a meeting perhaps, to, again, these newspaper articles that, even things like discussing the Snowden documents, would have been considered improper.”

Pérez also stated, “It still would have been improper for you to be discussing it, but at least you could clean it up a little bit better if it’s on a government — a .gov email address. And the problem here, is that, even if they were sending emails at the time that wasn’t classified, and — or they didn’t know that was classified, it’s still a problem. And so the legal argument for the Clinton campaign to try to clean this up is that well, we didn’t know that it was classified at the time it was sent. That’s not enough of an answer.”

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