On Fox News Thursday, Judge Andrew Napolitano discussed Hillary Clinton's answer to being asked about her email server and possible indictment during the Univision Democratic presidential debate the prior night. He said that her answers to these questions showed her natural inclination to not tell the truth, as well as her ignorance of the law.
Clinton was asked by moderator Jorge Ramos, "The question was, ‘who gave you permission? Was is President Barack Obama?’"
To which she responded, "there was no permission to be asked. It had been done by my predecessors. It was permitted. I didn’t have to ask anyone."
"If you are indicted would you drop out?" Ramos asked back.
"For goodness– it’s not going to happen. I’m not even answering that question."
Napolitano’s reaction to this was to point out that there is a difference between the emails and the private server itself. He stated that her two predecessors, Former Secretary Powell and Former Secretary Rice, "did not have servers in their home."
"The Secretary of State has two email streams," Napolitano said. "A regular email stream and a secret email stream. Mrs. Clinton hired, at her own expense, an information technologist to divert both email streams to her home server. Secretary Powell and Secretary Rice did nothing of the sort."
He finished, "You’re really comparing apples and oranges here."
Host Bill Hemmer questioned Judge Napolitano about if the public is asking the wrong question to Clinton. Should they be asking about the emails she sent or the server that was installed in her home?
Napolitano responded praising the moderator saying he "has an excellent understanding of what happened and asked the right question." He continued to explain how she inadvertently showed the FBI her inclination to not tell the truth when asked about this issue.
"In one of her answers, Bill, she revealed inadvertently, I think, to the FBI, which watches her debates, a proclivity to mislead. Because she said to Mr. Ramos just as she has been saying for a year now, ‘I neither sent nor received any email that was marked classified.’ We know and the FBI knows and she knows that nothing is marked classified. And yet, she continues to mislead the questioner, thereby sending, if you will, a dog whistle, to the FBI her natural inclination is not to tell the truth."
Napolitano continued to say he didn’t think that he would have phrased the question as ‘who gave you permission,’ but her answer was extremely important.
"But when she said I didn’t need permission […] she is revealing an ignorance of the law."
He explained that the issue no longer is national security law but who owns the emails of a government worker. Since the emails were passed through a government instrument, the government owns them. So, when emails are demanded, the person holding the account cannot decide which emails are made public and which emails are to remain private. The government decides which emails are government and which are private.
Napolitano ended the interview saying that, "if she believes this will go away, that belief is a false belief."