Clinton in September: ‘I Take Classified Material Very, Very Seriously’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

MITCHELL: “Do you know what a lot of people are asking? Why? Why have just a personal system? Because it was convenient.” 
CLINTON: “Yes.” 
MITCHELL: “Clearly from the e-mails that were released it wasn't convenient. There are a lot of convenient, there are a lot of, you know, confusing things, there were breakdowns, there were outages. Why do that? Were you trying to keep reporter or investigating committees away?” 
CLINTON: “No.” 
MITCHELL: “What was the defensive mode? 
CLINTON: “Well, I had a personal e-mail when I was in the Senate, as the vast majority of senators do.” 
MITCHELL: “Understood.” 
CLINTON: “It was very convenient. I did all my business on my personal e-mail.” 
MITCHELL: “You remember a member of national security cabinet.” 
CLINTON: “That's why I'm so careful about classified information. And has been confirmed repeatedly by the inspectors general over and over, I did not send or receive any material marked classified. We dealt with classified material on a totally different system. I dealt with it in person. I dealt with it on secure phone lines. I had the traveling team, the technical team that went with me and they set up tents so that when I was traveling anything that was classified would be protected from frying eyes. I take classified material very, very seriously. And we followed all the rules on classified material. Now, what happens when you ask or when a freedom of information request asks that information be made public, all the agencies get to weigh in. And what you're hearing from other agencies is, it wasn't classified at the time but now we think it should be. And that is not uncommon. In fact, if I had had just a government account that was on the unclassified system, they would go through the same process. So again, it's confusing and that's why I'm trying to do a better job of explaining it to the American people.”