Tongue-Tied Hillary Spox: ‘Republicans Are Trying to Turn [Emails] into a Partisan Issue’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

BLITZER: "So give us your perspective on what's going on, I guess this decision to question at least in court huma abedin you know well who has been close to the secretary for a long time. What's going on here from your perspective?" 
PALMIERI: "I think there are a couple of things in the report that Evan just did about that particular e-mail that I think is worth highlighting because what we think that shows that sort of illustrates for people how arcane the process on classification will be made public can become. That e-mail wasn't sent by huma abedin, it was sent by a service officer and it was marked sensitive but unclassified. This is a case where not only did the State Department say it was not classified at the time, it was specifically marked as unclassified." 
BLITZER: "One second. You're absolutely right. The original e-mail was sent to Davis to Jake Sullivan, huma 6 abedin and some other assistants to the secretary of state. Abedin forwarded this e-mail from her state.gov e-mail account to the secretary of state's private e-mail account. That's what huma abedin did, right?" 
PALMIERI: "That's right. It was eventually forwarded on. It was marked sensitive but unclassified. The State Department has deemed it -- has always believed it to not be classified material. It has been sent to the hill on one occasion, put on the state Department website as public information because they didn't think it was classified. Later other agencies have come in. Now that the e-mails are all going to be made public, other departments outside of the state Department are getting involved to determine if they think that they have equities here about why something should be classified. Our point is what I think there's a lot of questions about this, some of the reporting around is confusing. Why we are trying to educate voters more on this is to understand a couple of key core concepts here. "A," that using personal e-mail accounts that's not unprecedented. Other secretary of states have done it. It was permitted at the state Department guidelines at the time. It wasn't until 2014 after Hillary Clinton left the state Department that they said people should default to a dot-gov address and she said she would do it differently, if she could have it to do over again. She never sent or received e-mail that was classified at the time, and now that the state Department agrees with that and other departments are getting involved, because the e-mails are being made public and that is why we're going through this process we're going through now. We want to explain this to everyone and have them understand what the process is. It's not as if we didn't expect this to happen. It's Republicans taking this issue on the campaign trail on Capitol Hill and making it -- trying to make it a partisan issue."