A majority of Americans believe that Hillary Clinton is lying about the handling of her emails on a private server during her tenure as secretary of state, a new poll shows.
A survey released by Fox News on Thursday found that 60 percent of registered voters believe that Clinton "is lying about how her emails were handled while she was secretary of state," while 27 percent think she is addressing the situation truthfully. Thirteen percent of those polled said they remain uncertain.
The poll result is consistent with a survey released last September, which found that 58 percent of Americans believed Clinton to be lying about her emails.
The poll also found that 57 percent of Americans believe that Clinton put national security at risk by mishandling classified emails. Additionally, the former secretary of state has an unfavorable rating of 56 percent. Still, voters prefer Clinton slightly to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, according to the survey results.
The FBI has been investigating Clinton’s private email server and has reportedly been looking into whether classified material was criminally mishandled. Clinton, however, has sought to minimize the investigation, characterizing it as a security review. She has maintained that she did nothing wrong and said that she never received nor sent material marked classified on her email.
The intelligence community determined last year that emails on Clinton’s system contain classified information—some of it highly classified—though none of the messages were marked classified when they originated on the former secretary of state’s private server.
The latest poll was released days after Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination for president and hours after President Obama formally endorsed his former secretary of state. White House press secretary Josh Earnest was asked on Thursday whether the FBI could be pressed to go easy on Clinton given the endorsement. He appeared to admit in his answer that the investigation into Clinton’s email is "criminal."
"That’s why the president, when discussing this issue in each stage, has reiterated his commitment to this principle that any criminal investigation should be conducted independent of any sort of political interference and that people should be treated the same way before the law regardless of their political influence, regardless of their political party, regardless of their political stature and regardless of what political figure has endorsed them," Earnest stated.
FBI director James Comey has passed up the opportunity to describe the investigation as "criminal" but has also appeared to rebuff the Clinton campaign’s characterization of the probe as a security inquiry.
"It’s in our name. I’m not familiar with the term ‘security inquiry,’" Comey told reporters in May.