Former U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey says he was wrong to suggest that if Hillary Clinton was ever convicted of destroying government records by erasing the contents of her email server, she would be legally unqualified for the presidency.
The suggestion came Monday from Mukasey, a former federal judge who served as attorney general during former president George W. Bush's administration. He was also named as an early adviser to the Jeb Bush campaign.
On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Mukasey said "I think the more dangerous part of this, from her standpoint, is not so much the placement of the material here as wiping the server."
"Number one, that's a felony, but that statute disqualifies you from holding any further office in the United States and she's running for a further office under the United States."
He was referring to a section of federal law making it a crime to file false crop or weather reports and forbidding federal employees to falsify financial records. A statute in that section, titled "Concealment, removal, and mutilation generally," provides that anyone who has custody of federal records and who "conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys" them shall be fined or imprisoned or both and "be disqualified from holding any office under the United States."
But now, Mukasey says he was wrong.
Read more at NBCNews.com.