Story highlights President Barack Obama's former top military intelligence official said Hillary Clinton should pull out of the presidential race

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the general's suggestion was "just silly"

Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama's former top military intelligence official said Hillary Clinton should pull out of the presidential race while the FBI investigate her use of a private email server for official government communication while secretary of state.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the retired chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, made the call in an interview with Jake Tapper on "The Lead."

"If it were me, I would have been out the door and probably in jail," said Flynn, who decried what he said was a "lack of accountability, frankly, in a person who should have been much more responsible in her actions as the secretary of state of the United States of America."

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon later told Tapper the general's suggestion was "just silly" and pointed to similar FBI probes of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and of aides to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"In both of those two cases, you now have the same agency looking at their emails, personal emails, and saying that there is information that in retrospect they think should be treated as classified," Fallon said. "The exact same situation playing out in the two previous secretaries before Secretary Clinton. So I think that tells you everything about the relative seriousness of this."

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