Biden: Clinton struggled with email story because she’s been ‘battered’

by Jordan Fabian - 10/28/16 10:57 AM ET

Vice President Biden says Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had difficulty handling the controversy surrounding her private email server because she’s scarred from three decades of political attacks.

{mosads}“I don’t think she understood the gravity of setting it up,” Biden said in an interview set to air Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“She thought it was, you know, ‘This is okay to do,’” he added. “And then when — this woman has been so battered over the last 30 years — I think then when faced with, ‘This is a problem,’ I think instead of just cutting it and dealing with it immediately, there’s always an inclination to overthink it.”

Clinton’s campaign has struggled to contain the damage from the email controversy.

FBI Director James Comey in July declined to recommend criminal charges against the former secretary of State but admonished her for being “extremely careless” by handling classified info on her private server.

Newly released emails showed that Clinton’s camp was unprepared for a New York Times story last spring that revealed her personal email setup.

“Did you have any idea of the depth of this story?” John Podesta, her future campaign chairman, asked campaign manager-to-be Robby Mook in an email late on the evening of March 2, 2015.

“Nope,” Mook responded. “We brought up the existence of emails in reserach [sic] this summer but were told that everything was taken care of.”

While Biden defended Clinton, he also said he thinks “people reward you being straightforward.”

“I still think it’s the best policy,” he said. “But when you have been on the other end of a concerted effort, justified or not justified, to undermine your credibility, I think you probably are in a different place in terms of how your instinct, how does it respond.”

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