“They saw two little notes with a ‘C’ on it – this is the biggest load of bull I ever heard," Bill Clinton said of the email classifications. | Getty Bill Clinton: Hillary's emails as national security threat 'biggest load of bull'

Former President Bill Clinton on Friday forcefully dismissed the notion that Hillary Clinton lied when she said she never read classified emails while using a private server during her tenure as secretary of state.

Questioned by an audience member at the Asian American Journalists Association national convention in Nevada on whether the Democratic nominee had previously lied in defending her email usage, the former president blasted the notion that her actions at the time posed a national threat while highlighting inconsistencies in FBI Director James Comey’s statement on the matter.


“The FBI director said, when he testified before Congress, he had to amend his previous day’s statement, that she had never received any emails marked classified,” Clinton said. (Read the full report of Comey's congressional testimony here).

He went on to claim that the classification markings on the disputed emails were in reality just an internal reminder for staffers not to openly discuss documents in the event that the secretary of state had not yet acted upon them.

“They saw two little notes with a ‘C’ on it – this is the biggest load of bull I ever heard – that were about telephone calls that she needed to make and the State Department typically puts a little ‘C’ on it to discourage people from discussing it in public in the event the secretary of state, whoever it is, doesn’t make a phone call,” he said. “Does that sound threatening to the national security to you?”

The former president also cited the differing approaches to how security agencies and the State Department mark emails as classified, echoing a defense frequently made by the Clinton campaign throughout the election.

“The State Department and the security agencies have different classification systems,” he said. “These things were never resolved.”

During his address, the former president also took a thinly-veiled swipe at Republican nominee Donald Trump while outlining his vision for a diverse and inclusive United States.

“When I think of my dream America in the 21st century it includes an inclusive society that values our diversity,” Clinton said. “As a nation we clearly are less racist, sexist, homophobic than we used to be.

“Notwithstanding some unfortunate instances in this campaign, most Americans are not bigoted against other people because of their religion,” Clinton said in a likely reference to the Republican candidate’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S. “until we can figure out what’s going on” – a proposal his campaign has since reframed as a ban on immigration from countries plagued by terrorism.

Clinton, who has harshly criticized Trump while campaigning for his wife, went on to champion his spouse as the candidate of inclusivity.

“You want a president like Hillary who sees you as part and parcel of the American quilt of diversity, part of a whole country that is stronger together,” he said.