Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, said Thursday that the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email could be the "death knell" to the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign if she is found to have broken the law.
The Denver Post reported that Hickenlooper described the 2016 election as "kind of grim, to be blunt" before an audience at the FRED Leadership Forum in Denver.
Hickenlooper has rejected the idea of being Clinton’s running mate, but he said that the former secretary of state is qualified to serve as president. He expressed concern regarding her private email controversy, however.
"I don’t know where this whole thing is going to go in terms of her … [email] server and whether there is something in there that is really going to turn out to have broken the law—which I think would be the death knell," Hickenlooper told his audience.
Hickenlooper’s comments came just days after another prominent Colorado Democrat, former Gov. Dick Lamm, expressed concern about the email investigation.
"I think she can win the Democratic nomination unless something worse happens, and I think there’s a one in three chance that something worse does happen," Lamm said in an interview published this week. "But I think the words they associate with her—distrustful, liar, and dishonest—that’s not good stuff."
Lamm and his wife, Dottie, are close to the Clintons.
On Wednesday, the State Department released approximately 6,300 more pages of emails from Clinton’s personal account, 215 messages from which have been marked classified. The count of Clinton’s emails now deemed classified stands at more than 400.
While the former secretary of state has insisted that she never sent or received information marked classified on her personal email while working in the Obama administration, intelligence agencies have determined that at least two of the emails contained on Clinton’s personal system were top secret at the time they were sent.