Joe Scarborough Falsely Claims Clinton Ordered Others To Send Classified Information To Her Private Server

Written by Media Matters Staff

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Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough falsely claimed that as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set up her email system “so everybody, her subordinates, everybody else, had to send classified information through an unsecured server." However, Clinton never sent or received any information marked classified on her private email, and “has said she viewed classified information in hard copy in her office. If she was traveling, she used other secure channels.” Additionally, emails have been released that “actually show Clinton’s team talking about how they can’t email each other classified information." From the May 2 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): Why is the FBI investigation taking so long?

MIKA BREZEZINSKI (CO-HOST): They put it away.

SCARBOROUGH: This is a clear mishandling of classified information.

BRZEZINSKI: Or it's not.

SCARBOROUGH: Well, no, but, no, it is. Whether you bring an indictment against Hillary Clinton or those around her, it is a clear mishandling of classified information. It doesn't take this long. Why is the FBI dragging their feet? What political reason? What is their political motivation for dragging their feet?

MIKE BARNICLE: Well, it depends on who you talk to in Washington about why it's taking so long. Some say it's just the unnerving bureaucracy within the Justice Department and the FBI.

NICOLLE WALLACE: And the State Department took a while, too.

BARNICLE: That’s part of it. It took such an extended period of time for the State Department to get everything they needed to get to Justice. And then there is the theory that, you know, they're waiting for something horrific to happen on a Friday afternoon, that has nothing to do this, and then they release what they release for the weekend. I have not spoken to anyone who believes there is an indictable offense that has occurred, and that it’s going to be the result of the investigation. But to the extent, the time-consuming extent of this --

SCARBOROUGH: All I can say is you're talking to a very tightly focused crowd there.

BARNICLE: Well, not really, not really. There's a couple of people I've spoken to who, you know, think that there should be sort of a Petraeus ruling on it, at a minimum.

SCARBOROUGH: Yeah. No, I mean, you talk to people in the intel community, and they say anybody else would be in prison right now. If they'd mishandled classified -- talk to anybody in the intelligence community that's been doing this for 20 years, they will all say, if anybody mishandled classified information that way, they would be in jail right now.

WALLACE: Well, and it's not even the --

BARNICLE: Well, John Deutch lost his job.

WALLACE: And it's the operationalizing of it, right? It's the setting up the server to send and receive. Not just --

SCARBOROUGH: And putting yourself -- not to replay this all the time, but again, come on, FBI, wake up. I mean, the fact of the matter is that she set it up so everybody, her subordinates, everybody else, had to send classified information through an unsecured server. That would be like if I were the director of the CIA and I set my office up in a burger shack down the street and said, hey, you've got to bring the documents here, just leave them all in this file. It is the same thing. It is the same thing.

BARNICLE: And why would you do that? What would be the reason for you to do that?

WALLACE: He likes burgers.

SCARBOROUGH: I love burgers, I don't like them. I would do it because I'm paranoid and I don't want anybody inside the agency to have the access to anything because I'm going to run for president some day, which is what she did. She put her own political, her own political needs in front of classified information. So, again, is it, is it an indictable offense? A lot of people in the intel community think it is. But I don't think she's going to be indicted. I think they're going to let her skate. They might indict somebody below that. But just get it done. Like, seriously. Let the Democrats know, for sure, that they have Hillary Clinton as their nominee or not. Make your decision already.