WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Sunday that an email released Thursday did not show she had mishandled classified information, the latest twist in questions about the former secretary of state's communications practices.
"That did not happen, and it never would have happened," Clinton said in an interview on CBS News' Face the Nation. "That's just not how I treated classified information."
In a series of June 2011 emails, which the State Department released in response to a lawsuit, a top aide told Clinton that there had been difficulty sending a piece of information over secure fax.
"If they can't, turn into nonpaper with no identifying heading and send nonsecure," she wrote to the aide, Jake Sullivan, a former deputy national security adviser.
The State Department has one system for transmitting classified information and another for nonclassified. Some communications contain both types of information.
"Oftentimes, there's a lot of information that isn't at all classified, so whatever information can be appropriately transmitted unclassified, often was. That's true for every agency in the government and everybody who does business with the government," Clinton said.
Clinton said Sullivan, who is now an adviser to her campaign, never sent the information, which was a set of talking points for an upcoming phone call.
Clinton used a private email server to conduct government business while serving in President Barack Obama's Cabinet. The FBI is looking into the safety of classified information under the setup.
Clinton has said she did not send or receive information marked classified.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said Friday that Sullivan did not appear to have sent the talking points in question and called the presence of unclassified information on a classified system "not uncommon."
Clinton's interview marked a rare appearance on one of the Sunday political talk shows.
During the interview, Clinton responded to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC/Marist poll that showed her neck-and-neck with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire, which will hold the nation's first nominating contests in early February.
The poll showed Clinton leading Sanders by 48 percent to 45 percent in Iowa, within the margin of error. "These polls, they go up, they go down," she said. "I stay pretty focused."
Clinton, who has made support for gun control a key policy point, continued to criticize Sanders for his support for providing legal protection to gun manufacturers -- a measure that the National Rifle Association supported. Sanders has tied his support for gun rights to his largely rural, low-crime state, where hunting is a popular pastime.
In an appearance on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Sanders said he was "absolutely willing to take another look at that legislation and get rid of the onerous provisions."
A Section on 01/11/2016