Private email server still an issue for NH voters

HEINNEKER, N.H. — With four days until the New Hampshire primary, voters are still bombarding Hillary Clinton with questions about her private e-mail.

Clinton told the crowd at New England College that she wouldn’t make speech on Saturday afternoon and instead only take questions. “Ask me anything,” she said.

But the candidate’s eyes widened when first eager voter asked about her private email server and the “enormous amount of scrutiny” Clinton faces because voters “don’t trust you.”

“It’s not a stupid strategy,” Clinton said of the various attacks against her. “You sow doubts about somebody. You make claims about somebody, and even when it’s not true it leaves exactly the impression that you describe.”

Clinton said that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, her predecessors atop the State Department, used private email accounts, but do not face investigation. Questions about her email use are a Republican bid to “bring me down politically,” Clinton said.

Minutes later a woman asked the former senator and first lady why she used a private server and why she told her daughter the Benghazi attack was terrorism when she told the American people it resulted from a YouTube video. Clinton responded by discussing the events in Benghazi, while failing to talk about her email server.

Clinton said that it was “absolutely true” that the attack at the embassy in Cairo, before the attack in Benghazi, was the result of the video. When the Benghazi attack occurred there was “no clear understanding” of what had happened, she said. A Libyan terror group initially claimed responsibility, but distanced themselves the next day. Clinton said she emailed her daughter during that window.

“This was happening in real time,” she explained.

“I don’t understand the constant effort by some, including the press, to parse this,” Clinton continued. “The people on the ground were working as hard as they could, and I would imagine even if you were to make a list of who said what, there were people motivated by the video, there were people motivated by terrorism and there were people motivated by the attack in Cairo. But at the end of the day there was a terrorist attack.”

Rather than addressing the question about her email server, Clinton then listed past terror attacks against Americans that she said “were not politicized.”

The former secretary of state’s eight minute answer on Benghazi did not win over Alexandra Corin, the voter who asked the question. Corin said she is not sure if she’ll back Clinton.

“That was a caned response that she has been giving about the former [secretaries] having their own email, but she had her own server,” Corin told the Washington Examiner. “She mucked the response up because she was trying to defend herself so tremendously that the answer was convoluted.”