Chuck Todd: Clinton's Email Problems Show 'Classic Deflection'

NBC's Chuck Todd criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday for her "classic deflection" when it came to her emails, and said he's willing to give the State Department the benefit of the doubt over how long it took to release the documents.

"At the end of the day, the reason it’s taking a long time is because Hillary Clinton chose to do it out of the norm, out of the way it was done," said Todd, appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, reports Mediaite. "And she can claim she’s doing the same protocol as Colin Powell, but that was basically a half generation ago in how communications were dealt with, so it is a classic deflection and sort of confusing the matter in the moment."

Todd, who hosts NBC's "Meet the Press" program and will soon host his own news program at 5 p.m. daily on MSNBC, said he is also puzzled by Clinton's decision to use a private email server.

"It’s very possible that [Clinton] and her political team are paranoid about House Republicans and have been for years, are paranoid about transparency and have been for years, and so they said, 'We’re going to make this as hard as possible for Congress to sort of poke around our personal affairs,'" he said.

And when show co-host Mika Brzezinski told him that it would be a best-case scenario if that was the case, Todd replied, "It's not a good one."

Todd's comments came amid reports that multiple intelligence agencies had sent classified emails to Clinton's private email address, with information coming from the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National-Geospatial Agency, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA.

Pulling from a random sampling of emails Clinton released to the State Department, the Office of the Intelligence Community inspector general identified five emails containing classified information.

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