While the media circus surrounding Donald Trump’s “covfefe” tweet escalates to even more ridiculous levels, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton addressed her past email scandal at Recode’s #codecon event in California. Her remarks, which came less than a week after her commencement address at Wellesley College, her alma mater, included everything from some not-so-veiled references to the ongoing Russia probe, to what may have been the former state secretary’s attempt to drop a trendy term to steal covfefe’s thunder:
“The use of my email account was turned into the biggest scandal since Lord knows when. I’m just using everything that anybody else said about it, besides me, to basically say this was the biggest nothingburger ever. It was a mistake, I’ve said it was a mistake, and obviously if I could turn the clock back, I wouldn’t have done it in the first place. But the way that it was used was very damaging.”
(For anyone who doesn’t know what a “nothingburger” is, including myself prior to hearing Clinton utter it, Urban Dictionary defines the term as “something lame, dead-end, a dud, [or] insignificant.” That is to say, the former presidential candidate considered the legislative and reported hoopla concerning her emails was “something with high expectations that [turned] out to be average, pathetic, or overhyped.”)
When Recode’s Kara Swisher pressed her further about the matter, Clinton reiterated a point her campaign made time and time again throughout the 2016 election — especially when former FBI Director James Comey reignited the controversy in late October. “Doing something that others had done before was no longer acceptable in the new environment in which we found ourselves,” she said. “There was no law against it, there was no rule — nothing of that sort. So I didn’t break any rule. Nobody said, ‘Don’t do this.’ I was very responsible and not at all careless.”
Clinton concluded the moment with a reference to the New York Times, whose executive editor, Dean Baquet was interviewed by Recode the day before. “They covered it like it was Pearl Harbor,” she quipped, “but in their endorsement of me, they said, ‘This email thing was like a help desk issue.’ It was always a hard issue to put to bed, but we put it to bed in July, and then it rose up again.”