Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hasn't yet been hurt over her handling of disclosure that she conducted government business on personal email, but that might change if she doesn't publicly address the issue, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said.
In an appearance Sunday on
"Meet the Press," the California Democrat said she wants to see Clinton come forward and tell the public "just what the situation is."
Clinton is the "pre-eminent political figure right now," Feinstein said, far outpolling any other possible Democratic presidential candidates for 2016, and also mostly polling better than Republicans.
For that reason, Feinstein said, Clinton should "step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is."
Clinton conducted all of her official communications through private email hosted on a server set up in her Chappaqua, New York home. That has led to criticism of using less-secure methods of transmitting potentially top-secret information as well as speculation she was controlling which emails were kept for official records.
But Clinton has declined to talk about the issue except to post a late-night tweet on March 4 calling on the Justice Department to release her email "as soon as possible."
"I think at this point, from this point on, the silence is going to hurt her," Feinstein said.
Clinton says that she's turned over all relevant emails — totaling 55,000 pages — to the State Department for review. She did not address the issue Saturday night during an event in Coral Gables, Florida, for the Clinton Global Initiative University.
One of Clinton's predecessors, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday he has retained none of the emails sent from his person email account during his tenure at the department in the first George W. Bush administration.
"I don't have any to turn over," he said on Sunday. "I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off."
Powell added: "A lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and the State.gov domain. But I don't know if the servers (for) the State Department captured those or not."
Powell said all the emails from his account were unclassified and most were "pretty benign, so I'm not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them."
Powell made his comments on ABC's "This Week."
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