Joel Benenson, the senior strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said Monday that the Washington Post’s fact checker did not do his job when checking Clinton’s claims from the prior day on her private email server.
MSNBC’s Kristen Welker was interviewing Benenson and referenced a Washington Post article written Sunday in which Glenn Kessler examined a claim that Clinton made that day about her email practices to Fox News’ Chris Wallace.
"[FBI] Director Comey said that my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails," Clinton told Wallace on Sunday.
Kessler concluded that Clinton’s claim that FBI Director James Comey said she was "truthful" about her private server was false, giving her four Pinocchios, the worst grade one can receive.
"Clinton is cherry-picking statements by Comey to preserve her narrative about the unusual setup of a private email server. This allows her to skate past the more disturbing findings of the FBI investigation," Kessler wrote.
Benson responded to the fact check by accusing Kessler of failing to do his job and said he needs to go back and read Comey’s statements.
"I think the fact checker has failed to check his facts directly on this one and go back and look at what Director Comey said before Congress," Benenson said.
He then said that Clinton apologized for her "mistake" by exclusively using a private server for her emails while at the State Department.
"The fact here is, Hillary Clinton said over a year ago that using her own emails was a mistake. She apologized for it. We are now ten weeks from an election, where the American people want to know, between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which one of these people is going to create an economy that works for everyone," Benenson said.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, echoed this same sentiment earlier on Morning Joe when he was asked about Clinton’s truthfulness regarding her email scandal.