Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says Hillary Clinton's mushrooming email scandal will make it hard for her to convince Americans she can be trusted with state secrets — because "she might, in fact, leave them at a Chipotle restaurant."
"I wouldn't call for her to get out of the race because she's going to be such a damaged and wounded candidate without credibility of trust that she would be an ideal person to run against for the Republicans," Huckabee told "The Steve Malzberg Show" in an interview aired Tuesday on
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"Let's hope she stays in. I don't see how she can convince the American people that they ought to trust her with a nuclear launch code when she might in fact leave them at a Chipotle restaurant sitting on the table.
"This is a serious issue and the fact is some things can be said are political and so it's all in the realm of politics. This is not a political issue. This is a legal issue and what we're dealing with is whether or not she broke the law."
Clinton, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate, is being investigated by the FBI over her use of a private email address and server as secretary of state — and the possibility that top secret materials were exchanged over the unsecured system.
Court documents filed Monday showed federal investigators who are combing through Clinton's email server have
flagged more than 300 emails that passed through her email account that may have contained classified information. That number is expected to climb, as only 20 percent of roughly 30,000 emails have been screened.
Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, said Clinton shouldn't plead innocence in the handling of sensitive documents.
"As a governor, I had top secret clearance because after 9/11, the governors of the states were asked to go through the process to get top secret clearance … We had a briefing with FBI agents to make sure we understood what we had to do to protect any information that was given to us that was classified or that was ultimately top secret," Huckabee said.
"When I left office, I had to go back through another exit interview and I had to pledge and swear that I had not leaked any information and that I would not ever tell anything that I might have known as a course of my being the governor.
"For her to pretend like 'well, gee I didn't know' … that absolutely is nonsense. There's no way after being a first lady, after having been a U.S. senator and the secretary of state that she would've been oblivious to how this process works."
Huckabee added that Clinton also worked on the Watergate Committee.
"She knew darn well what cover-up was all about and she should've learned an important lesson way back in 1972 and 1973," he said.
Huckabee disagreed with some political pundits who say the Iowa primary is not as important as it once was in determining a presidential nominee.
"Well, of course it is," Huckabee told Steve Malzberg. "To say it isn't is just not to understand the process very well. It matters like the NCAA tournament in March. If you don't win in any of the early contests, you're not going to be in the Final Four," he said.
"And sometimes I hear these comments and they say Iowa doesn't matter, New Hampshire doesn't matter, but tell me who has become the nominee and the president who didn't win one of the first three contests. That would be no one. So this notion it doesn't matter is something not true."
He said one example is the presidential campaign of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
"Eight years ago at this point, Rudy Giuliani was way ahead of everybody else. He was in better shape than Donald Trump is in, but by the time the process came around, he ended up getting zero delegates."
In a new CNN/ORG poll, Huckabee substantially trails other GOP candidates.
The poll, conducted Aug. 13-16 of 1,001 adults, found Donald Trump has the support of 24 percent of GOP registered voters; with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 13 percent; retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 9 percent; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker tied at 8 percent; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul at 6 percent; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich all at 5 percent; and Huckabee at 4 percent.
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