Hillary Clinton said the State Department’s renewed focus on her emails is the “real” witch hunt, borrowing the phrase President Trump uses to discredit the investigations into his actions.
“It’s a witch hunt,” she told NowThis News on Monday. “And it’s a real one, unlike the kind of things that Trump talks about.”
She added, “I’m sorry that they’re doing it again because now they’re trying to bring in other people.”
‘It’s a witch hunt and it’s a real one.’ — @HillaryClinton explained how Trump’s new probe into her emails is a diversion tactic in this exclusive interview with NowThis pic.twitter.com/jntN7NxPy4
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 1, 2019
The Washington Post reported last weekend that the Trump administration is investigating the emails of as many as 130 current and former State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email.
Those contacted were told that the emails they sent years ago had been retroactively classified and could now be in violation of security protocols.
State Department investigators began reaching out to officials nearly two years ago, after Trump was elected, but then appeared to put the effort on hold until reviving it in August around the same time Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky led a whistleblower to sound the alarm.
State Department officials insisted the timeline was not politically motivated.
“This has nothing to do with who is in the White House,” a senior State Department official said. “This is about the time it took to go through millions of emails, which is about 3 1/2 years.”
Clinton said her reaction to the intensified investigation was “absolute bewilderment and disappointment,” arguing that it was meant to “muddy the waters” to take focus off the “danger [Trump] poses to our country.”
Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure leading the State Department was investigated by the State Department, the FBI, and Congress. The FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s email use was closed just before the 2016 election but she has cited it as one of the reasons she lost to Trump. The FBI ultimately did not recommend any charges in the case.
