HUGH HEWITT, HOST: There seems to be a lot of dysfunction coming to light, and I know you’re not involved in the presidential race. But are you surprised by the news that continues to come out about the former Secretary of State’s server and the fact that the intelligence community’s inspector general has said there was a lot of very highly classified information on her server?



FMR. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT GATES: Yeah, that’s a concern for me. I never used email when I was head of CIA or head of the Department of Defense. As I used to joke, I didn’t want to have some chief of station overseas email me and say he was going to do something if I didn’t get back to him in three hours, and I would get back from a five hour hearing to discover I was two hours too late. I preferred dealing with people face to face and putting a signature on a piece of paper on matters of real national security and importance.



HH: One of your colleagues, Mike Morell, said on this program, or actually agreed with my assertion that almost certainly, Russians, Chinese and Iranians had compromised the home brew server of the former Secretary of State. He agreed with that. Do you agree with his assessment of my assessment?



RG: Well, given the fact that the Pentagon acknowledges that they get attacked about 100,000 times a day, I think the odds are pretty high.



HH: And so if they had real time access to her server, would that have compromised national security?



RG: Well, again, it would depend entirely on what she put on there. And I just, I haven’t read any of these emails, so I don’t know what was on those servers.

