On Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS’s John Dickerson spoke to Jamelle Bouie, liberal writer for Slate, about Hillary Clinton’s upcoming testimony before the Benghazi committee and wondered if the GOP will “go over the top, and that she'll be able to use that” to her advantage.
The CBS News Political Director suggested that Clinton’s “team seems to be banking on the hopes that in this hearing, as Nancy [Cordes] suggested, members of Congress will behave as they occasionally do...use that. Do you think she’s got a shot at being able to turn that to her advantage?”
Rather than push back against Dickerson’s biased question, Bouie eagerly agreed and argued that if he “had to bet money on it I would say very much so”:
I think someone on that committee is going to say something that is going to give her a chance to play off of it to say this has been a witch hunt. There's no evidence of wrongdoing on my part, there’s no evidence of wrongdoing at the State Department and this is purely a political game that House Republicans are playing. Give me a hundred dollars to bet on this, and I think that's going to happen.
Earlier in the segment, Wall Street Journal reporter Gerald Seib complained that the ongoing questions surrounding Clinton’s e-mails distracted from the important issues her campaign has been trying to raise:
Hillary Clinton said some really interesting things this week about changing corporate incentives in America away from the next quarter, short term incentives that harm long term investment in this country. That’s a really interesting debate. It got almost no attention, maybe in the pages of the Wall Street Journal but it should have gotten more attention than it did. This kind of thing detracts from the substance of what Hillary Clinton is trying to do and I think that’s a long-term problem also.
See relevant transcript below.
CBS’s Face the Nation
July 26, 2015
JOHN DICKERSON: Gerald Seib, I want to ask you about Hillary Clinton. Her private server. There’s been a new development about the e-mails on that server, possibly classified information. What do you think, does this matter?
GERALD SEIB: It matters because it keeps an issue alive, and it' happens to be an issue that takes people back to the question of, can you trust Hillary Clinton? Is she honest, is she transparent? I don’t think the e-mails themselves matter as much as the broader questions that they raise. And I think it does go on for a while because there's thousands and thousands more e-mails to come out. They’re all going to be examined the way the first sets of e-mails were examined. It matters John, I think, for another reason.
Hillary Clinton said some really interesting things this week about changing corporate incentives in America away from the next quarter, short term incentives that harm long term investment in this country. That’s a really interesting debate. It got almost no attention, maybe in the pages of the Wall Street Journal but it should have gotten more attention than it did. This kind of thing detracts from the substance of what Hillary Clinton is trying to do and I think that’s a long-term problem also.
--DICKERSON: And also Jamelle her team seems to be banking on the hopes that in this hearing, as Nancy suggested, members of Congress will behave as they occasionally do, which is they’ll go over the top, and that she'll be able to use that. Do you think she’s got a shot at being able to turn that to her advantage?
JAMELLE BOUIE: If I had to bet money on it I would say very much so. I think someone on that committee is going to say something that is going to give her a chance to play off of it to say this has been a witch hunt. There's no evidence of wrongdoing on my part, there’s no evidence of wrongdoing at the State Department and this is purely a political game that House Republicans are playing. Give me a hundred dollars to bet on this, and I think that's going to happen.
