Donald Trump slammed Hillary Clinton over her private email use Monday during the first presidential debate, calling her mistreatment of classified information “disgraceful.”
Rejecting an attack on his refusal to release his tax returns, the Republican nominee offered to publish his filings if Clinton published the roughly 30,000 emails she wiped from her server.
Clinton repeated a familiar defense when asked to address her use of a personal server to host her government communications while serving as secretary of state.
“I made a mistake using a private email, and if I had to do it over again, I would obviously do it different,” Clinton said.
But Trump rebuffed her attempt to put the issue to bed.
“That was done purposefully,” he said, argung that her team’s behavior could not be mistaken “when you have your staff taking the Fifth so they’re not prosecuted.
“I think it’s disgraceful, and believe me, this country thinks this.”
His attack on Clinton’s email controversy drew applause from the audience at Hofstra University, N.Y., despite a prohibition on audible reactions to the candidates.
The controversy over Clinton’s emails has clung to her campaign since its launch in April of last year.
While the Democratic nominee has repeatedly attempted to shed the scandal by denying wrongdoing, a year-long FBI investigation and protracted open records process has allowed the allegations against her to survive.
One of Clinton’s most triumphant debate moments during the Democratic primary was handed to her by her chief rival when, in the October 2015 debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders asserted that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”
But Trump signaled early that he would give Clinton no quarter when it came to her email scandal.
Trump has built his “Lying, Crooked Hillary” moniker on the back of the email controversy, pointing to the outcome of the FBI’s investigation of the saga as evidence of the “rigged system” he hopes to upend.
FBI Director James Comey announced in early July that he would conclude the bureau’s year-long probe without recommending any criminal charges, despite finding Clinton and her aides had demonstrated “extreme carelessness” in their treatment of classified material.
Clinton’s statements about her emails have shifted in the year and a half since a New York Times article exposed her use of a private server in March 2015.
After claiming unequivocally that “there is no classified material” on her server, Clinton adjusted her standard defense to indicate that there was nothing classified “at the time” in her inbox.
But the early batches of emails that trickled out of the State Department suggested material on the server was indeed classified, and some of it should have been considered so at the time it was written. So Clinton began to argue that nothing on her server was “marked classified at the time.”
Even that statement was proven false when, in early July, the FBI announced it had discovered three classified emails that had been marked as such as the time they passed through Clinton’s server.
The Democratic nominee’s latest apologia has focused on the lack of classified headers in those emails, which bore only portion markings.
