ABC's Jon Karl: ‘Rough Night for Hillary’; Trump 'Let Off Relatively Easy’

September 8th, 2016 12:22 PM

On Thursday’s Good Morning America, anchors George Stephanopoulos, Robin Roberts, and Michael Strahan talked with ABC’s Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl about last night’s forum with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on foreign policy. Some liberal outlets this morning expressed outraged at Matt Lauer’s questions to the two presidential candidates, and Karl agreed that Trump didn’t receive as many hard questions as Clinton did, but laid part of the blame on her performance to her lack of “practice.”

“Look, the first thing is this was a rough night for Hillary Clinton,” Karl began.

“I mean, 13 minutes of questioning was on her e-mails...you could tell she was irritated by this,” he added. “She was legalistic, she was defensive. Donald Trump got off relatively easily,” he surmised. Karl noted Trump’s demeanor was more “at ease” and “confident” but that was probably because “he was let off relatively easy,” he repeated again.

He continued:

[H]llary Clinton needs to be able to handle these tough -- she still doesn't have a good answer on her e-mails and Donald Trump will not get off so easily in the next debate.”

Robin Roberts then asked if Clinton’s answers needed to be honed more because she hadn’t had a press conference in so long. Karl agreed that was a “huge” part of her problem, saying,

If she had been doing that the questions would have already been asked, Matt Lauer would have maybe felt less of a need to hammer over and over and over and over again on her e-mails but she’d also be more at ease with the questions.”