MSNBC correspondents Andrea Mitchell and Kristen Welker said Tuesday that FBI Director James Comey’s statement earlier that day on Hillary Clinton’s private email server will be politically difficult for the presumptive Democratic nominee.
"How many times have we heard Hillary Clinton say, ‘nothing was marked classified when it was sent or received?’ That’s been her out all along," Mitchell said. "This completely disputes that. 110 contained classified information. Not the 2,000 that were retroactively upgraded, which is what they have been disputing all along, that that’s a subjective judgment, she would say, by the intelligence community. But that 110 of them, that is significant, were, according to the FBI director, classified at the time they were sent or received, whether or not they were marked that way."
Welker agreed with Mitchell’s comments about Comey’s statement.
"That’s right. That has been Secretary Clinton’s main line of defense, that she never sent anything that was marked classified at the time and of course, as you point out, Director Comey said that’s just not the case today," Welker said. "So politically, that is going to be so difficult today because she is going to be holding her first joint appearance right here in Charlotte with President Obama. It’s undoubtedly going to cast a cloud over this event.
"And this feeds into concerns about trustworthiness," Welker added. "Remember, our latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll show that 69 percent of voters say that issues surrounding her trustworthiness are an important issue in this campaign. This is a liability in a general election and it continues to give Donald Trump fodder."