Hillary Clinton made a mistake when she used a private email server to conduct government business, but the then-secretary of state did not threaten national security, President Barack Obama said in a "60 Minutes" interview that aired on CBS on Sunday.

"I don't think it posed a national security problem," Obama noted about Clinton's communications approach, according to the network. "I think that it was a mistake that she has acknowledged. ... When we're in these offices, we have to be more sensitive and stay as far away from the line as possible when it comes to how we handle information, how we handle our own personal data."

Obama was adamant about drawing a distinction between the revelations about the Democratic presidential front-runner and cases involving others who were prosecuted for having classified material on their private computers.

"There's no doubt that there had been breaches, and these are all a matter of degree," he explained. "We don't get an impression that here there was purposely efforts ... to hide something or to squirrel away information."

The president's comments came as a Republican former staff member on the House Select Committee on Benghazi accused the panel's inquiry of having become political and of focusing entirely on the former secretary's messages, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The committee is looking into the email scandal as part of a broader investigation into the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. outpost in the Libyan city, which ended in the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

The staffer, Maj. Bradley Podliska, claimed that he lost his job in part because he refused to center his investigation on Clinton. An unidentified committee spokesperson, meanwhile, "vigorously" denied the allegations leveled by Podliska, an intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserve, CNN noted.

"The committee will not be blackmailed into a monetary settlement for a false allegation made by a properly terminated former employee," the spokesperson insisted.