President Barack Obama said Hillary Clinton displayed a "carelessness" managing her emails as his secretary of state during an interview with Fox News Sunday.
"I continue to believe that [Clinton] has not jeopardized America’s national security," Obama said. "Now, what I’ve also said is that, and she’s acknowledged, that there’s a carelessness in terms of managing emails that she has owned."
The president defended Clinton by drawing a distinction between information that is labeled as classified or "top secret" and information that is truly important to America’s security.
"There’s classified, and then there’s classified," Obama told host Chris Wallace. "There’s stuff that is really top secret, top secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want or going out over the wire. But that is basically stuff that you can get in open source."
Clinton is currently under FBI investigation for handling classified information on her private email server and will reportedly be interviewed along with her top aides in coming weeks.
In total, 2,115 emails on Clinton’s server have been deemed classified, and 22 of them are considered "top secret" and cannot be released to the public for national security reasons. Fox News reported in January that some of the intelligence found on Clinton’s server was known as "special access programs," the government’s highest classification level.
It has also been reported that Clinton’s server was susceptible to hacking and that some countries tried to access the information it contained. A Romanian hacker was extradited to the U.S. this week to, according to experts, make the case that Clinton’s emails were possibly compromised by a third party.