Former U.S. Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton appeared on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday. And she wasn't afraid to address what's become the elephant in the room of her political campaign. During the interview, Clinton joked about Emailgate with Fallon. It's a surprising take, considering how the controversy has affected her campaign.
"Can you just say what's in the emails?" Fallon asked Clinton. "That's all we want to know." Clinton laughed as he joked that perhaps the reason she didn't want the emails to be public is that she sent the kind of emails which one might expect to get from their mom — written in all caps, or with typos. Clinton was happy to hop on that hypothesis, adding that the emails in question were ridden with misspellings.
"Most people have gotten bored after reading, you know, 10 or 12, because they're boring!" Clinton said. She added that one of the "significant" emails that has come to light detailed a time that she was asked if she could get gefilte fish into Israel so that it could be used for Passover. She didn't discuss any emails that contained actual government information, though.
Clinton added that she is "taking responsibility" for her mistake, and is "trying to be as transparent as possible" about the emails. But she also said that there's often government confusion about what is categorized as classified and unclassified, and she suggested that most of the emails containing government information didn't include topics that were classified at the time. She also stressed again that the emails were "boring."
While we totally understand Clinton's desire to discuss something — anything — other than her private email server, it was clear to viewers that she was deflecting questions. When Emailgate first broke, Clinton insisted that she'd done nothing wrong. But earlier this month, she said that she was "sorry" for her actions. She also joked on The Tonight Show that it "hurts [her] feelings" that people find the emails boring, though this came off as an attempt to minimize discussion of the issue.
Fallon used the "Grandma's using email!" punchline as a segue into asking Clinton about her social media presence, noting that she uses Twitter and Vine. "You know, it is the way to communicate," Clinton said to Fallon. "I actually like it." She added that it gives people a way to become "part of a bigger community than you could ever be in reality."
For all of the trouble Clinton has been through with the email scandal, that's definitely a positive way of looking at the Internet.
