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Hillary Clinton: 'Another conspiracy theory'
A seemingly frustrated Hillary Clinton strove on Sunday to link the latest flap over her personal email server with the string of scandals and attacks Republicans raised against her in the 1990s.
“During the ’90s, I was subjected to the same kind of barrage,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” noting that voters elected her a senator in New York despite the attacks.
“When I ran for the Senate, they overlooked all of that,” the former secretary of state and front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination continued. “I was elected senator after going through years of back and forth.”
After a series of questions about her emails from NBC host Chuck Todd, including a new charge that a recently released email exchange with former CIA Director retired Gen. David Petraeus occurred earlier than she acknowledged using her personal account, an exasperated-sounding Clinton asked Todd whether his next question would be about “another conspiracy theory.”
She rejected the notion that her decision to use a personal email server as secretary of state was meant to evade public records searches, noting that congressional investigators unearthed many of her emails before she released them because they were obtainable through public systems. She acknowledged, however, the “drip, drip, drip” of accusations leveled at her, but couldn’t guarantee when they would stop.
“There’s only so much I can control,” she said, characterizing her responses as entailing “more transparency and more information than anybody I’m aware of that’s ever served in the government.”
She used a personal email server, she said, because her husband, former President Bill Clinton, had set it up in their house after leaving office.
Clinton also defended herself on Sunday from charges that she’s altered her positions on issues like same-sex marriage, the Iraq War and the Keystone XL pipeline out of political expedience.
“I just don’t think that reflects…my assessment of issues, and I don’t think it reflects how people who are thoughtful actually conduct their lives,” she said, suggesting she takes positions based on the information available to her at the time.