MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said Tuesday that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server that was subsequently destroyed was "very clearly in violation" of State Department rules.
It was revealed earlier in the year that Clinton used a private email server to circumvent federal records requirements during her time as secretary of state. Government workers are required to conduct business on an official email address that saves correspondence to a government server so that they can be held accountable for their actions.
O’Donnell said Clinton skirted those rules.
"It goes back to the original issue, which is the proper custodial preservation of State Department emails," O’Donnell told other panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. "All of the rules and protocols on that were violated, there’s no question about it. It was very clearly in violation."
The Morning Joe panelists were discussing the recent discovery by a House investigative committee that Clinton did not turn over all of her work-related emails to the State Department.
Clinton previously claimed that all work-related correspondence from her private server was disclosed to the government, while personal emails about wedding arrangements and yoga routines were deleted.
"And that is not true," O’Donnell said. "We’ve found that is not true."
O’Donnell, who is typically a Clinton defender, could not explain her suspicious response to the private email server.
"I’m trying to think of some way to explain what she meant when she said she turned over all of the State Department emails and everything else on there was just wedding stuff," O’Donnell said.
"Can you give me some time?" he joked. "Is there a commercial break coming up so I can work on an email disclosure defense?"
By way of a "partial defense," O’Donnell said he doubts there is a "smoking gun" in the heavily curated emails that Clinton released to the State Department.
"We’ll never know" what was on the server, O’Donnell said.
"Because she deleted it," host Joe Scarborough responded.