NBC’s Andrea Mitchell said Tuesday that she didn’t get to ask Hillary Clinton all of her questions about using a private email account, because she worried the candidate would cut off the interview.
“We were told we had a 15-minute interview,” Mitchell told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I asked more than 12 minutes on emails before I felt — out of concern that they would cut it off, obviously — that I had to move on.
“I couldn’t ask everything that I did want to ask,” she added.
{mosads}Mitchell said Clinton believes she used her personal email ethically.
“She is not going to apologize,” Mitchell said. “She says she did nothing wrong.
“It was not illegal,” she continued. “But there was plenty of guidance, I should say, against it. That’s the point I was making — that it was recommended against.”
Clinton in the interview on Friday declined to apologize for using the private server while she was secretary of State.
The Democratic front-runner said “it wasn’t the best choice” but defended the decision as “above board.”
Clinton said only that she was sorry the situation had been “confusing” for voters.
“At the end of the day, I’m sorry this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions,” she told Mitchell.
Mitchell said Tuesday that she didn’t believe Clinton justified her use of the server during the interview.
“I think we did get a good chance to ask a lot of questions and discover that she did not have an answer for why she did the personal server in the first place,” she said.
Mitchell said it was still unclear what motivated Clinton to use the private account.
“We can infer a lot of things from her background from the way she was introduced to national politics in the middle of all of the troubles that her husband was incurring during the New Hampshire primary in 1992,” Mitchell said, referencing former President Bill Clinton.
“There were a lot of reasons, why, perhaps, she did this,” she continued. “She’s never answered it herself. We don’t have an explanation as to why [she] chose only a personal server, not having the official one.”
The controversy has dogged Clinton and raised voter concerns about her transparency and honesty, gradually eroding her support in multiple national polls.
Clinton vowed on Monday that she is not apologizing for using a personal storage device while at State.
“What I did was allowed,” she told The Associated Press in Iowa.
Reports also emerged on Tuesday that Clinton’s personal email server hosted two messages marked “top secret” during her tenure as secretary of State.