Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a CNN town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
(CNSNews.com) — Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Democrat town hall Tuesday night that her use of a private server to send work-related emails — many of them now marked classified as the State Department sorts through them — was not “an error in judgement” because “nothing that I did was wrong.”
Recent reports quote the Intelligence community inspector general as saying that a few of those emails contained information with a classification beyond top secret. More than a thousand of Clinton’s emails released by the State Department have been redacted — information withheld because in retrospect, it is deemed too sensitive for public consumption
But despite the ongoing controversy, none of the voters at Tuesday night’s CNN-sponsored town hall asked Clinton about the national security implications of her decision to use a private server.
Moderator Andrew Cuomo brought up the email issue in-between voters’ questions, and he did it in conjunction a newspaper endorsement:
“The Des Moines Register, as we said earlier, gave you an endorsement,” Cuomo said. “Did it question your judgment, though, when it came to the email issue?” he asked.
According to the newspaper, Hillary “is not a perfect candidate, as evidenced the way she has handled the furor over her private email server. In our endorsement of her 2008 campaign for president, we wrote that ‘when she makes a mistake, she should just say so.’ That appears to be a lesson she has yet to fully embrace.”
Cuomo asked Clinton if that was “fair criticism.”
“Well, I think that they’re — you know, look, I was delighted to get theRegister’s endorsement. And it was a very generous one,” Clinton responded.
“And yes, I think that’s a fair criticism. You know, I had no intention of doing anything other than having a convenient way of communicating, and it turned out not to be so convenient. So again, we’ve answered every question and we will continue to do so. But you know, maybe being faster, trying to scramble around to find out what all of this means, I probably should have done that quicker.”
“You’re willing to say it was an error in judgment, you should’ve apologized?” Cuomo asked Clinton.
“No. I’m not willing to say it was an error in judgment because what — nothing that I did was wrong. It was not — it was not in any way prohibited. And so–”
“Not apologizing sooner, I mean,” Cuomo said — avoiding the serious substance of the ongoing FBI investigation that hangs over Clinton’s campaign.
“Well, apologizing sooner, as soon as you can,” Clinton replied. “But part of the problem, and I would just say this as, not an excuse, but just as an explanation.
“When you’re facing something like that you got to get the facts. And it takes time to get the facts. And so when I said, ‘Hey, take all my emails, make them public’ — that had never been done before, ever, by anybody. And so we’ve been sorting our way through this because it is kind of a unique situation.
“I’m happy people are looking at the emails. Some of them are you know, frankly a little embarrassing,” Clinton added.
The audience laughed.
“You know. You find out that sometimes I’m not the best on technology and things like that. But look, I think it’s great. Let people sort them through. And as we have seen there is a lot of — you know a lot of interest. But it’s something that took time to get done.”
At the beginning of CNN’s Democrat town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, moderator Andrew Cuomo said the point of it was to hear from the voters. “Audience members submitted questions to us. We have screened them to make sure they cover a variety of important issues, and they do. However, the candidates do not know what the questions will be.”
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a CNN town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) 
