Hillary Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri struggled through an interview with Bloomberg’s John Heilemann on Wednesday.
In her attempt to do damage control for Clinton’s testy press avail on Tuesday, Palmieri stammered through her answers to Heilemann’s questions. She complained no one was bothering Gov. Jeb Bush over his email server, insinuated Clinton’s bathroom server may have been more secure than the State Department’s, and compared Clinton’s server saga to "Deflategate."
Palmieri initially said Clinton did not order anyone in her staff to wipe her server, but rather only to delete any of the emails they deemed personal in nature. However, she walked back the statement while stuttering in confusion over the technical difference between deleting emails and wiping a server. Her inability to explain away any of the numerous questions still hanging over Clinton reveals the campaign’s inability to move past the issue.
Often vacuous and always defensive, Palmieri’s interview suggests Clinton is not the only one who should take a long, expensive vacation.
Here's more from Bloomberg's writeup of that interview:
Palmieri's interview comes a day after the Democratic presidential front-runner faced a barrage of questions during a tense news conference in the Las Vegas area about her server, which she says was recently turned over to the FBI. When pressed about whether she wiped the server clean, Clinton replied, "What, like with a cloth or something?" She added, "I don't know how it works digitally at all."
After Palmieri was pressed on what exactly Clinton ordered to be done with the e-mails, she offered a similar response to the candidate's, throwing in a reference to the so-called Deflategate professional football controversy.
"To be deleted and beyond that I don't know and beyond that I don't understand—this is like, everyone's an expert on inflating footballs and now everybody's an expert on wiping servers. Like, I don't know how that all works," Palmieri said.
When Palmieri was asked about the "cloth" joke her boss cracked during Tuesday's news conference, she shrugged off criticism.
"She's sitting there—in this case she's standing there—and she's taking all these questions and I, you know, I think she actually shows good humor about it and also a little bit of humanity," Palmieri said. "People always say we need to see authentic Hillary, and if she gets a little frustrated then you get to see that too."