State Department Report Slams Clinton Over Emails
BLITZER: A stinging report by the State Department inspector general is sharply critical of Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server while she served as secretary of state, finding that she failed to follow the rules and inform key staff. Let's dig deeper with our CNN justice correspondent Evan Perez. He's with us, together with the rest of the panel. What are the biggest revelations -- you've done a lot of reporting on this -- in this very lengthy 80-plus page report?</s>EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE REPORTER: Wolf, the biggest finding is the fact that the state department inspector general went through, couldn't find a single person in the legal department, state department or in their security apparatus that had approved for secretary of state Clinton to use this private server. There was at least a couple of staffers lower do you know who raised questions and concerns about this, and they were simply told this has been approved up high and that they shouldn't bring it up again. That was told them by one of their supervisors. That's a kind of a surprising finding simply because we've been hearing for months from the Clinton campaign that this was a probe, there was nothing wrong with this, this was according to the rules, and clearly, according to this inspector general report, it was not abiding by the rules at the time.</s>BLITZER: Another secretary of state, Hilary, refused -- had a private e-mail account, not server, but a private e-mail account, that was Colin Powell. He cooperated with the inspector general, answered questions. She didn't. She refused to appear and spend time answering questions. Why?</s>ROSEN: Well, you asked Brian Fallon, Hillary Clinton's --</s>BLITZER: I didn't get a good answer because she says she's willing to testify, to answer questions from the FBI and Justice Department, she appeared before the Benghazi committee for 11 hours, she did a long news conference. But when the inspector general whose mission is if there are mistakes, extra mistakes, find out what happened so they're not repeated, why would she not at least sit-down with the inspector general and answer those questions?</s>ROSEN: Two things. One is there already was a Justice Department investigation where she had pledged her cooperation.</s>BLITZER: She hasn't yet appeared.</s>ROSEN: Well, she hasn't been asked. She's offered.</s>BLITZER: She could do both.</s>ROSEN: She in theory could, but, you know, you might be told when you're in an investigation, do it one time for the official investigation. There was always, Brian was too polite to say</s>BLITZER: But if she has done nothing wrong, if she's done nothing wrong and she has nothing to hide, why not at least cooperate with the inspector general?</s>ROSEN: There was always some question about whether this inspector general that kind of got out there early on and made comments about Secretary Clinton, whether this was going an inquiry that mattered enough to warrant that full cooperation. So, she is cooperating with the Justice Department. Look, here's the thing, this is not good but, you know, there is a DOJ investigation. We will see what happens there. But, ultimately, Hillary Clinton sort of did the best she could, but most importantly admitted she made a mistake. Elections aren't about choices.</s>BLITZER: If she had to do it over again --</s>ROSEN: She would do it.</s>BLITZER: -- she wouldn't have done it like that. She did it like that at the time.</s>ROSEN: So, that's what we can expect. We can expect her to say I made a mistake and --</s>BLITZER: By the way, correct me if I'm wrong --</s>BLITZER: The inspector general who did the report was appointed by President Obama in 2013.</s>PEREZ: Was Democratically appointed.</s>BLITZER: Democratically appointed -- Democrat-appointed inspector general.</s>PEREZ: And to Hillary's point, I mean, this is probably what her legal advisers told her, and that would be legal advice given to anyone. However, the optics are not good. She's running for president.</s>ROSEN: Yes.</s>PEREZ: She's the former leader of this department. And for her to not cooperate with the inspector general for the department she led while other previous secretary of states did and the current one also did really doesn't look good.</s>ROSEN: You bear optics. That's what you do. You bear some bad optics.</s>BLITZER: The optics, but she's running for president.</s>ROSEN: Right.</s>BLITZER: Let me read the tweet that Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, put out. The inspector general's findings are the latest chapter of the long saga of Hillary Clinton's bad judgment that broke federal rules and endangered our national security." So, I went through the whole report and there were a couple attempts apparently to hack into her private server. We don't know if anything really happened. But is there any evidence that national security was actually in danger?</s>MADDEN: Well, I don't think you have to take Reince Priebus' word for it. I think you just read the report. I mean, the report, it had two specific citations. The first that the personal e-mail server -- the use of a person email server was, in fact, a violation. The second was that the use of that private server put security information at risk. So, if you take that and couple it with previous e-mails that have been disclosed as part of the turning over some of these e-mails, and that they had information in there that was classified or information that was born classified, there was a risk. So, I think -- and the ultimate arbiter of this is whether or not the public believes that these were -- was a lack of judgment in there as well the Department of Justice --</s>BLITZER: Hold on, another inspector general's report from the intelligence community did say there was classified information, confidential classified and some really top secret information.</s>PEREZ: One of the more shocking parts of this report was the fact that after she thought she was being hacked, she complained to her staffers. In the report, it says their solution was simply to unplug the server. That doesn't seem like a good way to solve a problem. They didn't report it to their security officials to try to make sure they could bolster the security of the server, they simply unplugged it temporarily for a few minutes to stop the attack.</s>ROSEN: But right now, there is no evidence at all that there was any national security breach or risk or problem. There were some e-mails that people questioned, and the State Department classified after the fact. So, she did not traffic in them. So, you know, look, again, it's not great, but don't think that you can sort of talk about this as putting the country at risk when we haven't seen that at all. That's a dramatic political analogy.</s>BLITZER: You're on the Hill. A lot of Republicans think there was major national security risk.</s>RAJU: That's right. They see this as --</s>ROSEN: Of course, they would.</s>RAJU: They see this as a clear issue to be used in the general election, because Bernie Sanders does not shy away from this because public polling really shows a lot of Democrats simply don't care about this. But when you bring this into a general election context, you go after her trustworthiness, it's an effective argument against Hillary --</s>BLITZER: All right, guys. Excellent conversation, thanks very much. The story is not going to go away. Just ahead, the latest on the search for EgyptAir Flight 804. Time is running out to find those black boxes that potentially could solve the mystery of the crash.