National Journal reporter Ron Fournier laid out the facts and unanswered questions surrounding the Hillary Clinton email scandal Wednesday on Morning Joe.
Officials revealed Tuesday that Clinton hired an IT firm in Connecticut to back up information from her email account, marking yet another "drip" in the investigation into Clinton’s private server.
Clinton has been criticized for not being forthright about her use of a private email server to handle classified government information. Her narrative about the server has flip-flopped, changing as the State Department releases her emails.
When asked what the public knows, Clinton’s claims aside, Fournier was not optimistic.
"They haven't been telling us the truth," he said. "They've been holding back the truth and deceiving us."
"Look, we don't know and may never know what was in the emails deleted and whether there was any original wrongdoing on our behalf of the secretary of state," Fournier said. "We could even assume that there wasn't wrongdoing as far as all the rumors out there and that kind of thing.
"What we do know is it was bad government and against regulations, at least nine months into her term, to have a covert server that took all of her email out of the public domain. We do know that was an abrogation of the Freedom of Information Act. It went around the congressional right and responsibility for oversight, and we know that the only reason we found out about this was because of a congressional investigation," he said.
Fournier had little sympathy for Clinton, calling the scandal a "self-inflicted wound."
"She caused her own problem and I’m having a hard time feeling sorry for the poor Hillary Clinton campaign," Fournier said.
He then laid out questions still surrounding the investigation.
"Who had authority to override federal regulations? I don't think anybody did. Who actually did it? Who went through her emails and deleted them? Do they have security clearance? Why did she say from the beginning there was no confidential top secret information in her email when now we know there clearly was? Why has she said from the beginning that none of them were marked classified and now we understand that that didn't matter either way, that people have been prosecuted for less?" he asked.
"There's so many questions she hasn't answered and until she does there's going to be a layer of doubt over her campaign," Fournier said.