CNN host John King said Hillary Clinton’s claim to want to be transparent with her private email server "makes you roll your eyes a little bit" Sunday on Inside Politics.
Clinton has been dogged by questions about her private server while secretary of state, the deletion of more than 30,000 of them that she deemed of a non-work nature and sending and receiving classified information on it.
The Wall Street Journal reported Clinton sent multiple emails that should have been deemed classified at the time, and an investigation has been launched into whether such information was mishandled.
"I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received," Clinton said Saturday in Iowa. "If we were not asking for it to be made public, there would not be a debate. This is all about my desire to have transparency and make the information public."
"That last part makes you roll your eyes a little bit," King said. "She was not exactly at the forefront of transparency in trying to make this public, and in fact, if she had listened to the President of the United States, her boss, on day one of the administration and done this on a government server, we wouldn’t have these issues."
King asked the panel how potentially damaging the probe into the email server would be.
"The problem for the Clintons is that this is baked into their image over so many years," said CNN reporter Maeve Reston. "You think about that clip right there, she sounds so lawyerly and you have to parse every word, and people don’t like that."
UPDATE 11:15 A.M.: An earlier version of this post had the headline "You have to roll your eyes" when King actually said "you roll your eyes a little bit." Also, an investigation, but not necessarily a "criminal" one, has been launched into the classified emails. The Justice Department initially referred to this as a criminal referral before revising, and this article has been updated accordingly.