After more than 200 days without holding a formal news conference, Hillary Clinton took her most extensive questions from journalists in months on Friday — and it wasn’t so bad after all.
Ms. Clinton said she took “seriously” the problems she has had winning voters’ trust. She clarified recent remarks about the FBI investigation into her private e-mail server. And she explained that the economic frustration driving many of Donald Trump’s supporters should be taken as seriously as his “bigotry” that appeals to some.
She even had some words of encouragement for the Fourth Estate: “We need you to keep holding leaders and candidates accountable,” Ms. Clinton told the hundreds of journalists attending the five-day conference here of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Ms. Clinton was asked about the latest flare-up involving her use of a private email server as Secretary of State, namely her comments last Sunday on Fox News that the FBI director, James Comey, had found her earlier remarks that she had never sent or received classified e-mail on the server to be “truthful.”
On Friday, Ms. Clinton said she “may have short circuited” in two recent interviews in which the e-mail issue came up and offered further clarification.
“I was pointing out in both of those instances that Director Comey had said that my answers in my FBI interview were truthful,” she said. “That’s really the bottom line here.”
Ms. Clinton reiterated her earlier explanation that the classified e-mails the FBI had identified as having passed over her private server were not marked classified at the time.
The explanation didn’t appease Republicans. “It’s not hard to see why she hasn’t held a press conference in 244 days,” said the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus. “Hillary Clinton is once again proving herself incapable of telling the truth.”
Questioned about why a majority of voters don’t trust her, Ms. Clinton referred to her high approval ratings when she was Secretary of State and a Senator from New York.
When asked about what Mr. Trump’s millions of supporters, who are often drawn to language she and others have called racist and sexist, indicate about the public mood, Ms. Clinton said that while some people were backing him due to his “bigotry,” she acknowledged that many were motivated by economic hardships. — New York Times News Service
