Claire McCaskill: Hillary Clinton ‘should have been better prepared’ for email questions

Sen. Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat, said Monday that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton “certainly” should have been better prepared to handle questions about her private email use as the nation’s top diplomat.

“She certainly should have been better prepared for questions about that,” Ms. McCaskill said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “How that process worked and who made the decision, and I think there should have been some thought about whoever was making that decision have some kind of credible shine of independence.”

Ms. McCaskill, who backed President Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, got out early this time around and announced her support for Ready for Hillary, a group backing a would-be 2016 Clinton presidential run, in June 2013.

“Listen, has this been handled perfectly? Obviously not. Is this a bump? Yes,” Ms. McCaskill said. “The question is, you know, what happens when we start looking at everyone else’s emails? Is everyone else giving up their personal emails?”

Saying she “fully complied with every rule,” Mrs. Clinton acknowledged last week that she used a private email system out of convenience, and that she had turned over 30,490 emails to the State Department and deleted nearly 32,000 emails that were deemed private.

Ms. McCaskill said she wasn’t there to defend the way things were handled, but she said Mrs. Clinton is “an incredibly strong candidate for president with an enormous amount of support in this country with the strongest resume.”

“Ultimately, I think, as we have found with a lot of these controversies around the Clintons, there has been an awful lot of smoke, and really not a lot of fire,” she said. “Go back in history and I think in the long run, the people of this country — people in Missouri aren’t talking to me about her emails. They’re talking to me about why it is that they can’t afford to retire.”