Longtime NBC anchor Tom Brokaw blasted Hillary Clinton on Sunday for her admission that she didn’t really "think" about the potential ramifications of having an unsecured email server at the State Department.
Appearing on Meet the Press, Brokaw said he was "stunned" and that it "astonishes me" that Clinton could not see the potential risks of her private server being hacked, adding that Clinton’s central campaign component of experience had been undermined.
Clinton made the remark in an exclusive interview Friday with MSNBC reporter Andrea Mitchell.
"She’s made some huge mistakes, in my judgment," Brokaw said. "In that wonderful interview that Andrea initiated … when she said ‘I didn’t think’ about the effect of email, I was stunned. We were deep into the digital age at that point. She’s secretary of state."
"Do you believe her?" host Chuck Todd asked.
"I believe that she was presumptuous, is what I believe, and that’s what a lot people think, that she’s presumptuous about, if I believe it, it’s the right way of doing things," Brokaw said. "Where were the security people at the State Department saying, ‘No, Madam Secretary,' you have to have a secure server over here."
"At this point, to suggest that as secretary of state, as much as she’d been around, she didn’t think about the impact and the possibility of hacking, just astonishes me. I think it takes away from her big argument of ‘I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I know what I’m doing.'"
The email scandal and the surge of left-wing favorite Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) have had a combined negative effect on Clinton in the polls. According to new surveys, Sanders has extended his lead in New Hampshire and is gaining on Clinton in Iowa, the same state where then-Sen. Barack Obama dealt Clinton a stunning defeat in 2008.