New York Times reporter Mark Landler told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Friday that President Barack Obama has a history of disrupting ongoing intelligence and security investigations by giving anticipatory remarks.
"It's actually not the first time this has happened," Landler said. "There's real frustration at the FBI that the president not only got out ahead of the investigation, but maybe foreclosed a certain legal course that might have happened otherwise."
In an appearance on 60 Minutes last week, Obama told host Steve Kroft that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server did not jeopardize national security.
"This is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered," he said.
However, Obama's answer predated an ongoing inquiry by the FBI that aims to determine whether Clinton's private server undermined national security.
"Was the president—who is a lawyer, a constitutional lawyer—getting way out ahead of himself, or was he trying to signal a political bent there?" Mitchell asked Landler.
Landler said that Obama's declaration threw off the investigation into Clinton's server, angering FBI officers in the process.
"I think the reason the FBI officers are so upset with this is they now think, how can an Obama Justice Department bring a criminal charge, if one is warranted against Hillary Clinton, when the President of the United States has declared he doesn't think this was a threat to national security?" he said.
He added that Obama also threw off an FBI investigation into whether General Petraeus shared classified information with his biographer in 2012.
"If you recall, he made some similar comments when General Petraeus shared his diary with his biographer, suggesting again it wasn't a huge threat to national security," he said. "In fact, there had been a recommendation by the FBI that a felony charge be brought against General Petraeus. In the end that didn't happen."
Mitchell said that the Attorney General, "a very close friend of the president," overruled the FBI's decision.