Hillary Clinton Responds To Allegations Of Wiping Out Her Email Server — ‘Like With A Cloth Or Something?’ [Video]

When a reporter asked Hillary Clinton whether she wiped her email server clean before handing her emails over to the Justice Department, she responded with a joke. At Tuesday’s town hall in Las Vegas, Fox News’ Ed Henry asked Hillary Clinton whether she wiped out information on her email server.

Hillary rolled her eyes, waved her arm back and forth as if to erase a chalkboard, smiled, and responded, “Like with a cloth or something? No, no. I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”

Did you wipe the server? “Like with a cloth or something?” @HillaryClinton asks

— Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) August 18, 2015

Watching Clinton’s response to Henry’s question brings up some interesting points about body language – especially the human eyes.

Body language experts will point out that when people close their eyes when answering a question, they may be deceptive or hiding something.

Psychology Today offers this brief explanation about eye blocking.

“Eye blocking is just one of the more obvious things that we do. When we are troubled, frustrated, or struggling with something emotionally, our eyelids may also close hard and remain closed or the eyelids may flutter rapidly as an expression of our sentiment.”

Watching Hillary Clinton’s body language, when answering Ed Henry’s questions, is well worth noting.

Another observation Psychology Today points out about body language of the eyes involves when people are nervous or troubled when answering a direct question.

“Research also shows that when we are nervous or troubled our blink rate increases, a phenomenon often seen with liars but also frequently seen with people under stress. I would not call anyone a liar just because their blink rate goes up although while studying Richard Nixon I did notice that when he was struggling with facts while talking to the press his blink rate went from about 12 per minute to 68 times per minute. Bill Clinton during his deposition showed a high blink rate at times in excess of 92 per minute, but again these were individuals under a lot of stress.”

Clinton did manage to explain her point of view to the listening audience and the Fox News reporter.

“All I can tell you is in retrospect, if I had used a government account, and I had said, let’s release everything, let’s let everybody in America see what I did for four years; we would have the same arguments.”

Hillary Clinton added, “I know there is a certain level of anxiety or interest in this, but the facts are the facts.”

The Los Angeles Times reports Clinton’s comments about the issue of her personal emails and her government account.

“I’ve been thinking about the fact that I get a lot of attention because I had a personal email account, as did other high-ranking officials in the State Department and elsewhere in the government. And I had not sent classified material, nor received anything marked classified.”

Hillary elaborated more about the process of releasing her emails.

“If I had had a separate government account, so that I had a totally designated government account and a totally designated personal account, and I started running for president and I said, ‘I want the American people to see everything that was part of my time in the State Department, because I think it’s educational, and I want the State Department to release all of my emails’ — which they already had, by the way, you know, in the government computer system — we would be going through the same process.”

Clinton explained how her email account issue would not be relevant in the past.

“That’s what I want Americans to understand. When something is released — whether it’s in response to a Freedom of Information request or in my case, where I said there’s 55,000 pages out there, please put them out, there is a process that has to be gone through. You want to make sure nobody’s personal email is on there and other personnel issues — those kinds of things. So we would be going through the same [thing] because other agencies get to make the same claims. Like, you know, this may not have been an issue in 2009, but now it is. Or in 2011 this should have been handled differently than it was.”

Clinton attempted to rest the issue and explained her insight relating to the review process.

“It has nothing to do with me. And it has nothing to do with the fact that my account was personal. It’s the process by which the government — and sometimes in disagreements between various agencies of the government, make decisions about what can and can’t be disclosed. So I’m very comfortable that this will eventually get resolved, and the American people will have plenty of time to figure it out.”

When Fox News‘ Ed Henry followed up his questioning, Clinton replied, “Ed, you’re not listening to me,” and repeated her explanation of the review process.

At that point, Hillary Clinton was asked repeatedly whether she “wiped the server.”

She answered, “Like with a cloth or something? No, no. I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”

[Featured image via Isaac Brekken/Getty Images]