Appearing on Friday’s CBS This Morning, Bloomberg Politics managing editor John Heilemann stressed that despite her best efforts, Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal was “getting worse by the day.”
After Heilemann and the three CBS hosts spent the majority of the interview discussing the ongoing feud between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, Charlie Rose only found time to ask one question about the Clinton e-mail scandal. The CBS host vaguely wondered “[o]n the other side, the Democrats, you've got Bernie Sanders filling stadiums as well, 28,000 people they’re expecting, and the e-mail controversy. Where is it now?”
The Bloomberg Politics managing editor pointed out that the scandal was getting worse for Clinton and “for some of the aides around her at the State Department” which has intensified with the ongoing FBI investigation:
The FBI investigation is getting more serious every single day. There's more signs that there were e-mails that were classified, either marked classified or should have been marked classified that were sent to her. Nobody’s saying she sent them yet, but that were sent to her and ended up on the home server of hers. That’s against the law.
Heilemann continued to blast Clinton’s team for their “clumsy, defensive” way of dealing with her private server and suggested that this will hurt her politically down the road:
And so the FBI, now they’re not just investigating the server itself but how these messages got to her. Did her aides paraphrase top secret things and send those things to her server? Again, it's everything about this, the way they've handled it this week, clumsy, defensive, evasive and the actual seriousness of the investigation gets a little bit more serious every single day and more worrying for her politically.
While Heilemann was extremely critical in his assessment of Clinton’s management of her private e-mail server, he spent the majority of the time playing up the potential damage Trump’s immigration plan could have on the entire Republican Party come 2016:
24 hours in its hard to know if it’s getting traction or not. The anchor baby thing could be a big problem for Jeb Bush just like Trump’s immigration plan which seems to be pulling the party further to the right on immigration, could be a big problem for the party in the general election but for all these people right now, their bigger concern is Donald Trump is frontrunner, how do I get to be the nominee? They've got solve that problem before they can solve the second problem.
See relevant transcript below.
CBS This Morning
August 21, 201
CHARLIE ROSE: On the other side, the Democrats, you've got Bernie Sanders filling stadiums as well, 28,000 people they’re expecting, and the e-mail controversy. Where is it now?
JOHN HEILEMANN: Getting worse by the day for Hillary Clinton. And as much for her as for some of the aides around her at the State Department. The FBI investigation is getting more serious every single day. There's more signs that there were e-mails that were classified, either marked classified or should have been marked classified that were sent to her. Nobody’s saying she sent them yet, but that were sent to her and ended up on the home server of hers. That’s against the law.
And so the FBI, now they’re not just investigating the server itself but how these messages got to her. Did her aides paraphrase top secret things and send those things to her server? Again, it's everything about this, the way they've handled it this week, clumsy, defensive, evasive and the actual seriousness of the investigation gets a little bit more serious every single day and more worrying for her politically.
