Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has pushed back against new concerns that she received classified emails through her personal email account while serving as secretary of State.
Campaign Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri warned supporters about “misinformation” and “nonsense” in an email on Wednesday afternoon.
{mosads}“It’s vital that you read and absorb the real story so that you know what to say the next time you hear about this around the dinner table or the water cooler,” Palmieri wrote in a bid to shoot down rising criticism about the emails.
“Look, this kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for president,” she added. “We know it, Hillary knows it, and we expect it to continue from now until Election Day.”
Among other claims, Palmieri asserted that Clinton never personally sent or received emails that included classified information.
However, she did acknowledge that the situation had become “complicated” by the passage of time.
“It’s common for information previously considered unclassified to be upgraded to classified before being publicly released,” she wrote. “Some emails that weren’t secret at the time she sent or received them might be secret now.
“And sometimes government agencies disagree about what should be classified, so it isn’t surprising that another agency might want to conduct its own review, even though the State Department has repeatedly confirmed that Hillary’s emails contained no classified information at the time she sent or received them.”
The email to supporters comes a day after major revelations that two emails that passed through Clinton’s email contained information that should have been marked “top secret,” leaving open the potential for future revelations and stoking new scrutiny about the possibility of a criminal investigation.
Shortly after the Tuesday evening announcement from government inspectors general, Clinton turned over her private computer server — which housed the personal email account that she used throughout the course of her tenure at the State Department — to the Justice Department, as well as USB drives containing copies of her work-related emails.
The campaign’s swift response to the news highlights the potential vulnerability for Clinton, the Democratic front-runner in the race for the White House.
Multiple Republicans vying to face off against her in the general election quickly criticized Clinton over the revelations on Wednesday, indicating that they view it as a potentially crippling blow to the former secretary of State.
As part of her argument to refute the allegations of impropriety, Palmieri took her chance to hit Republican candidates with complicated email histories of their own.
“As [Florida] governor, Jeb Bush owned his own private server and his staff decided which emails he turned over as work-related from his private account,” she wrote.
Louisiana Gov. “Bobby Jindal went a step further, using private email to communicate with his immediate staff but refusing to release his work-related emails,” she added, while also accusing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Texas Gov. Rick Perry of having had “email issues themselves.”