Atlantic magazine editor Steve Clemons spun Hillary Clinton's use of a private, unsecured e-mail server as the natural, "defensive" reaction to being "under political assault" by people like Ken Starr. On Tuesday's Andrea Mitchell Reports, the MSNBC contributor exonerated, "We don't know exactly what the rationale is, but there was a certain defensiveness that makes a lot of sense when you look back at how under assault the Clintons have been."

Clemons allowed, "This is a family, you know, a franchise, if you will, that has been under political assault for a very long time." The journalist insisted that in the wake of the Clintons's battle with Ken Starr, with Whitewater and the "constant conspiratorial atmosphere around them," using a separate e-mail server "was an act of defensiveness to try and protect some bit of their terrain from enemies that I think they feel are embedded all around them."

Mitchell began the discussion by reading an involved series of exchanges between Clinton and aide Huma Abedin. Government tech officials were confused as to what Clinton's actual e-mail address was. Making an actually salient point, the Andrea Mitchell Reports anchor opined, "So, Steve, her original explanation was this was convenient. This hardly seems convenient."

Further justifying, Clemons insisted that the then-Secretary of State was "dealing with lots of people who had come just out of the Bush administration."

A transcript of the exchange is below: