Clinton repeats debunked claim about FBI email investigation
By Eli Watkins
CNN
Hillary Clinton is repeating her false claim that the FBI said her statements on her use of a private email were “truthful.”
“As the FBI said, everything that I’ve said publicly has been consistent and truthful with what I’ve told them,” Clinton said in an interview with KUSA’s Brandon Rittiman on Wednesday.
Clinton made a similar claim — which was widely debunked — in an interview last weekend on “Fox News Sunday.”
“(FBI Director James Comey) said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails,” Clinton said.
The Washington Post’s fact checkers gave the statement “four Pinocchios,” their worst possible rating.
At the conclusion of the FBI’s investigation, Comey said the agency had found many troubling practices surrounding Clinton’s email use as secretary of state, and in his testimony before Congress, the FBI director did not back Clinton’s public statements in which Clinton said she had not sent or received classified information on the private server.
The FBI did not say — as Clinton had — that all classified information stored within her private email system was “retroactively classified.” On the contrary, Comey said, “There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
Following the blowback to Clinton’s interview Sunday, her spokesman, Brian Fallon, said, “She was indicating in that interview to Chris Wallace was what she said to those Justice Department interviewers was entirely consistent with what she has said to the public for the last several months.”
Meanwhile, her opponent, Donald Trump, has also made a series of tenuous claims in the past two days. Speaking about the revelations surrounding the Obama administration’s $400 million cash payment to Iran, Trump has twice said he had viewed a secret video released by the Iranian government.
The Washington Post, however, has reported that the video Trump has spoken about was not a secret tape released by the Iranians but instead B-roll footage on Fox News of a jet flying from Iran to Geneva as part of the release of Iranian-held hostages.
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