Andrew McCabe, CNN's senior law enforcement analyst, defended former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information while discussing former President Donald Trump upcoming arraignment for his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his estate at Mar-a-Lago.
"But let’s talk about the Hillary Clinton case, because that was a serious breach of protocol and she was criticized by the FBI director at the time for being — I think he used the word ‘reckless,’ I might be wrong. But what is the difference?" host Jake Tapper asked.
"There’s huge differences here, Jake. And unlike what you’ve heard from Congressmen McCarthy and Biggs, our system is not based on — you know, we don’t play by organized crime rules. It’s not you take out one of my guys, I take out one of your guys. It’s all equal," McCabe, the former deputy FBI director, said.
"In the Clinton case, what we had in the Clinton case was essentially 113 E-mail conversations, this is of tens of thousands of E-mails reviewed, the 30,000 she handed over plus many thousands more we were able to recover, 113 E-mails over the course of 55 conversations, eight-top secret documents, 37 secret doc — not documents, content judged to be at that level and 10 at the confidential level. Important to note that none of that was actual documents bearing headers and footers and classified stamps and portion markings and all the sorts of things you expect to see," McCabe continued, adding, "It was simply content of conversations that implicated information that should have been classified at that level."
Tapper said the investigation into Clinton's actions did not find evidence of her trying to hide the classified information from the government.
"Neither the IG nor the FBI was able to cover any evidence of intentionality, intention to remove material, intention to withhold material, intention to essentially converse in classified ways," McCabe said. "It was simply conversations, mostly it was information that was sent to Secretary Clinton while she was secretary and that she either responded to or received."
What McCabe left out is it was not just emails, but the secret server Clinton maintained until her office's practice was uncovered.