After months of a coordinated smear campaign against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account during her tenure at the State Department, Fox News is now suggesting that President Obama may be protecting Clinton from criminal charges due to a “personal conflict” because he exchanged emails with her over her private server. Fox asserted that Obama was protecting Clinton while admitting that the investigation has found that none of the emails between the two contained classified information.

On the April 11 edition of The Kelly File, Fox chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge conducted a supposed “fact-check” of Obama’s comment, “I continue to believe [Hillary Clinton] has not jeopardized America’s national security,” which he made during an April 10 interview on Fox News Sunday. Herridge scandalized Obama’s remarks by suggesting that the president should have declined to comment on the investigation and questioning whether Obama may have “a personal conflict” due to reports that he exchanged as many as 19 emails with Clinton.

In Herridge’s report, she admitted that the emails between the president and Clinton “don’t contain classified information,” but she also included commentary from former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General Thomas Dupree, who suggested that Obama has a “personal conflict” in the investigation.

Fox News has been on the offensive since the beginning of the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, baselessly claiming that her private email use constituted a crime and that she negligently transmitted top secret information that put lives at risk.

Legal experts have consistently explained that “there doesn't seem to be a legitimate basis for any sort of criminal charge against” Clinton. In a March 20 column for the American Prospect, University of Michigan law and sociology professor and former Department of Homeland Security classification expert Richard Lempert explained that after analyzing Clinton’s conduct and “[b]ased on what has been revealed so far, there is no reason to think that Clinton committed any crimes with respect to the use of her email server, including her handling of classified information.” 

In addition to the lack of evidence of criminal wrongdoing by then-Secretary of State Clinton, a thorough State Department investigation concluded that past secretaries of state -- including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice -- and their immediate staff also “handled classified material on unclassified email systems.”

Herridge has also repeatedly reported unreliable information provided by unnamed sources in order to attack Clinton. In January, Herridge boosted the reportedly false claim that up to 150 FBI agents were assigned to the investigation on Clinton’s server. On March 29, The Washington Post issued a correction for its own report that nearly 150 agents were involved, noting that there is actually less than 50. NBC News later reported that the number of agents assigned to the case was “about 12,” with a former FBI official quoted as saying, “You need an act of terrorism to get 50 agents working on something.” Herridge also cited anonymous sources who accused Clinton of gross negligence and violation of the espionage statutes in her handling of purportedly “classified” or “top secret” information, a claim experts have repeatedly called into question.