Hillary Clinton's claim on Meet The Press that she did participate in the "exhaustive process" of deciding which emails were personal or work-related conflicts with statements she made earlier on the subject, MSNBC's Morning Joe pointed out Monday.
"All I can tell you is when my attorneys conducted this exhaustive process, I did not participate," Clinton told NBC's Chuck Todd Sunday. "I did not look at them."
"Why?" Todd asked. "I would want to know what emails ... Why wouldn’t you want to know?"
"I wanted them to be as clear in their process as possible," Clinton said. "I didn’t want to be looking over their shoulder. If they thought it was work-related, it would go to the State Department. If not, then it would not."
However, in August, when Fox News reporter Ed Henry asked her if she tried to wipe the whole server so there would be no emails left, Clinton had a different explanation.
"My personal emails are my personal business, right?" Clinton said. "So we went through a painstaking process and turned over 55,000 pages of anything we thought could be work-related. Under the law, that decision is made by the official. I was the official. I made those decisions, and as I just said, over 1,200 of the emails have already been deemed not work-related."
Author Mark Halperin said Clinton's supporters were upset with her over the email scandal already, and their consternation is growing as Clinton gives "inconsistent" answers.
"She's not doing much to put it behind her, despite her going out and doing lots of interviews," Halperin said. "I think the number of inconsistencies, the number of questions, amazingly is growing rather than diminishing."
The Huffington Post's Sam Stein offered a strange defense of Clinton, saying that Clinton deputizing her lawyer to take care of parsing through her emails didn't constitute an inconsistency with saying she wasn't "looking over their shoulder." However, Stein said the scandal had a "drip-drip-drip" quality, which Clinton acknowledged during her interview with Todd.
"It's tough to see how she breaks away from this," Stein said.