The combined effect of a federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email and the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in the polls is placing the Clinton campaign "in a very tough position," Bloomberg's Mark Halperin said Wednesday on The Today Show.
Clinton announced Tuesday she would surrender her private email server from the State Department to the Justice Department amid new reports that it contained top-secret emails. Clinton initially claimed she never sent nor received classified information over the server before saying she did not ever knowingly do so.
"Now you have her email server in the hands of a federal investigator," NBC's Savannah Guthrie said. "If nothing else, this means this is going to keep following her right into the fall campaign."
"This is really important," Halperin said. "It's August of 2015, but between the poll with Bernie Sanders and this email development, Hillary Clinton campaign is in a very tough position. They could find more secret information. They could get the server and recover her personal emails that they deleted. What if they do that and find either more secret information, or what if they find government information that she didn't hand over? This is peril for her. She's now sworn under oath she handed over everything she was supposed to hand over."
"So potentially a political problem, potentially a legal problem," Guthrie said.
"Even if it doesn't go legal, just the political problem will linger a long time," Halperin said.
The two also discussed the surprising poll showing Sanders, who trailed Clinton by 36 points in March in New Hampshire, now leading her 44-to-37 in the state. Sanders has had the polar opposite week of Clinton, with headlines about huge crowds out west coming out to see him speak over the weekend.
"His authenticity and his heart showing identification with the Democratic base ... She's going to have to fight to beat him," Halperin said.