Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as Secretary of State to send classified information made the national security community nervous and angry for her "disrespect for the system," Washington Post columnist David Ignatius said Tuesday.
Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Ignatius was asked by host Joe Scarborough what his sources in the intelligence field felt about the revelation that more than 300 emails on Clinton's unsecured server have been flagged for potentially having top-secret information.
"You know the intel community as well as anybody in Washington, D.C.," Scarborough said. "I don't know about who you've spoken with. I've spoken to a lot of people in the intel that I've known for 20 years. They're horrified by this."
"I think people are genuinely upset," Ignatius said. "You have to remember we just have had a CIA director, David Petraeus, one of the most decorated generals in our modern history, who had to plead guilty to a criminal charge involving this question of unauthorized use of classified information. It's not a trivial issue. Secretary Clinton wandered into this with her email server. She's been scrambling ever since."
Ignatius also praised colleague and MSNBC commentator Eugene Robinson, a liberal columnist who ripped Clinton in his latest writing Monday for lacking "basic respect" for the truth. Ignatius called it a "self-inflicted wound" that was no one's fault but Clinton's.
Scarborough asked Ignatius to explain the spin by the Clinton campaign that "nothing was marked classified" and why that made intelligence officials "roll their eyes" since the responsibility for knowing the secrecy of that information was on the sender and receiver.
"I think what's always made people in the national security community nervous about the Clintons is that they seem to play by different rules," he said. "In their world, things that are marked classified have to be treated very, very differently and respected, and I think it's that sense of disrespect for the system that's animating a lot of the anger now."