After his appearance yesterday on ABC's "This Week," Hillary Clinton may be wondering whose side James Carville is on.
Never mind Carville's frequent and rude interruptions of other guests, his seemingly calculated incoherence, and his false claims about the Clintons' past record of corruption. Even though that behavior doesn't represent the Clintons well, they have to know that's part of the package when they use Carville as a defender. What wasn't expected is that Mr. Mary Matalin would admit that Mrs. Clinton may have set up her private server at her home in Chappaqua, New York specifically to hamper any future efforts by congress to carry out its consitutionally assigned oversight functions. But he did, as will be seen after the jump.
A Republican or conservative spokesman making such as assertion would have been raked over the coals on the spot by "This Week" host George Stephanopolous, a Clintonista himself (the operating assumption is that one never becomes a former Clintonista). But Steffie, after allowing Carville to play stall-ball for a bit, let it pass without challenge (HT Hot Air; bold is mine):
Transcript:
(ABC REPORTER JONATHAN) KARL: ... while Hillary Clinton said that the e-mails that she was sending to employees on their State Department e-mail accounts were being preserved, it now turns out that that was often not the case.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And lots more questions coming from Congress.
OK, Jon, thanks very much.
Let's dig into this now with James Carville, long-time Clinton ally, Ana Navarro, confidante of Jeb Bush, Republican strategist, Greta van Susteren from Fox News and the editor of "The New Yorker," David Remnick.
Welcome to all of you.
James, let me begin with you.
JAMES CARVILLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: All right.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I heard you laughing during that part that Democrats are having second thoughts.
But what has the Clinton camp taken away from this?
CARVILLE: Well, first of all, we've go to start with what a former Obama aide had concerns. OK. But let's get serious here.
What this is is the latest in a continuation and if you take it all and you put it together and you subtract 3.1415 from pi, you're left with not very much. And that's what -- at the end of the day, so the Republicans can't pass a budget. All right, we've got another investigation, just like we had the Whitewater, just like you go through the Filegate, you go through Travelgate, you go through seven or eight different Congressional committees you wonder why the public is not following this. Because they know what it is.
It was something that she did. It was legal. I suspect she didn't want Louis Gohmert rifling through her e-mails, which seems to me to be a kind of reasonable position for someone to take.
It amounts to — just like everything else before it, it amounts to nothing but a bunch of people flapping their jaws about nothing.
Mr. Gohmert is a Republican Congressman from Texas who is among many representatives in the People's House attempting to carry out their constitutional oversight duties.
By admitting to a suspicion that former Secretary of State Clinton set up her own private email server because she didn't want Gohmert "rifling through her e-mails," Carville has opened up the possibility — given her secretive, paranoid history, that probably means the high likelihood — that the former Secretary of State did what she did to make it more difficult and perhaps impossible, thanks to an apparent penchant for deleting emails under her direct control, for Congress to do its job.
Regardless of the fact that Stephanopolous pretended that Carville's admitted suspicion and his petulant, defiant and condescending "about nothing" assertion aren't extraordinary, they are, especially in regards to Mrs. Clinton's potential presidential candidacy. "I proactively prevented a branch of government from carrying out its constitutional oversight duties" will not be a resume enhancer with the American people, perhaps even low-information voters and even a plurality of dedicated Democrats.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
