Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business when she served as secretary of state was a mistake but did not endanger national security, Barack Obama told 60 Minutes on Sunday.

Obama said public officials have to be more sensitive about how they handle information and personal data. Yet he also said the criticism of Clinton, who is leading the Democratic race for the presidential nomination, has been “ginned up” because of politics.

“I think she’d be the first to acknowledge that maybe she could have handled the original decision better and the disclosures more quickly,” Obama said in an interview.

Obama downplayed the threat to national security, and when it was pointed out that his administration has prosecuted people for having classified material on their private computers, the president said he didn’t get the impression there was an intent to “hide something or to squirrel away information”. He also said he was not initially aware of her use of the private email server.

There are still questions being raised about the security of that system.

The president discussed the Republican race to succeed him, saying Donald Trump was “the classic reality TV character” who had tapped into something real in the Republican party but was unlikely to end up as president.

“He is a great publicity-seeker - and at a time when the Republican party hasn’t really figured out what it’s for as opposed to what it’s against,” Obama.

Obama also discussed his views on Syria during the interview. The administration said on Friday it was abandoning a Pentagon effort to build a new ground force of moderate rebels and overhauling its approach to instead partner with established rebel groups. The change also reflects growing concern in Obama’s administration that Russia’s intervention has complicated the Syrian battlefield and given new life to president Bashar Assad.

Obama said he was “skeptical from the get-go” about the notion of creating an army of moderate forces within Syria. “My goal has been to try to test the proposition, can we train and equip a moderate opposition that’s willing to fight ISIL? And what we’ve learned is that as long as Assad remains in power, it is very difficult to get those folks to focus their attention on ISIL,” Obama said.

Obama said part of the strategy behind the administration’s efforts was to “try different things”. He added that “in a situation that is as volatile and with as many players as there are inside of Syria, there aren’t any silver bullets”.

While the Pentagon is abandoning its effort to train rebels, a CIA program that since 2013 has trained some 10,000 rebels to fight Assad’s forces is ongoing.