Obama: Hillary Made Email ‘Mistake’

President Obama called Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server “a mistake” during an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, but dismissed it as a threat to national security and said it was instead “ginned up” into an attack by Republicans looking to mar her presidential campaign. Obama said Clinton “could have handled the original decision better” and moved quicker to disclose work-related emails that were kept on her private server. During the tense interview, Obama also defended his policy in Syria and noted that the U.S. had “pretty good intelligence” on Russian plans for military intervention in Syria before he met with President Vladimir Putin at the UN. The president dismissed criticisms that allowing Russian airstrikes in Syria weakened American leadership, contending that it indicated the Syrian government’s “strategy did not work.”