President Barack Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday that while Hillary Clinton had been careless in managing her emails as secretary of state, she would never intentionally do anything to endanger the country.
In his first interview as president with “Fox News Sunday,” Obama also forcefully vowed that his administration would not interfere with the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server.
“I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI — not just in this case, but in any case,” Obama told Chris Wallace, the program’s host. “Full stop. Period.”
In October, Obama drew criticism from some in the Justice Department after he said during a “60 Minutes” interview that Clinton’s use of the personal email server did not pose a national security problem. Some FBI officials said the president sounded like he was prejudging the outcome of their investigation.
During the Fox News interview, the president appeared to be mindful of that concern, saying, “I’ve got to be careful because, as you know, there have been investigations, there are hearings, Congress is looking at this.”
But he went on to offer what could become one of Clinton’s central defenses against prosecution: “Here’s what I know — Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy.”
Investigators for the FBI and congressional committees are examining the emails that Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, sent and received during her four years as secretary of state. The State Department has identified more than 2,000 emails that contained material that is now deemed as “classified,” including nearly two dozen with “top secret” information. None of the emails were marked as such when Clinton received them.
Obama said he still believed that Clinton “has not jeopardized America’s national security,” and he suggested that government agencies sometimes placed classified designations on information that was already broadly available to the public.
“There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” the president said. “There’s stuff that is really top-secret top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.”
Federal law enforcement officials have said that the FBI investigation could conclude by next month, and that investigators could soon seek to interview Clinton or her closest aides.
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