On Friday’s Washington Week, PBS’s Gwen Ifill and her two panelists, Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty and CNBC’s John Harwood, did their best trying to defend Hillary Clinton from the ongoing controversy surrounding her use of a private e-mail server while Secretary of State.
Ifill insisted that “[i]n their defense, what the Clinton people seem to be doing is establishing as much distance between the candidate herself and any controversial behavior."
The PBS anchor wouldn't discuss the merits of Clinton’s server potentially containing classified documents on it and instead stressed how the campaign was trying to make the issue “as confusing as possible. Because maybe voters look at it and say, like Whitewater, I cant keep track but it makes me feel funny.”
John Harwood went through a lengthy explanation of the FBI’s investigation into her potentially mishandling classified documents, which he admitted had hurt her in polls, but eventually predicted she could survive this scandal:
She's underwater in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, she was minus 11 points, 30 -- I forget the exact numbers but it was double digits on the negative side. But I do know historically Bill Clinton was in double digit negative territory before his 1992 convention and turned it around.
Karen Tumulty provided the most full throated defense of Mrs. Clinton and highlighted how the former Secretary of State never actually sent classified documents but merely received them on her private server:
The most questionable material that investigators have come across is not primarily -- it's not things she was sending. It's things that people were sending to her or forwarding to her, in many cases things she didn't even respond to.
Not to be outdone, Harwood rounded up the show's defense of Clinton by dismissing the importance of her server containing classified information altogether:
And in one case that was the AP. wrote about the -- information that was in a top secret category, it was based on a news article. It was about a drone program that was technically classified but it had been written about many times.
While the PBS program did discuss the ongoing problems for Mrs. Clinton, her e-mail scandal apparently was not important enough to be mentioned during the show’s opening which meant its audience would never know it would be brought up at the top of the broadcast:
The candidates descend on Iowa and on each other. Why no one is ceding the stage to Donald Trump. Plus from Cuba to Iran, celebrations give way to complexity. We explain how. Tonight on Washington Week.
See relevant transcript below.
Washington Week with Gwen Ifill
August 14, 2015
KAREN TUMULTY: Well, the big news this week was that her attorney David Kendall had turned over to the FBI you never want to hear the FBI mentioned when you are running for president, had turned over a thumb drive that had copies of all of her emails on them. A few weeks ago they were insisting they were not going to do that. What this says is that this investigation that began and may continue to be contained through the question of is all the sensitive material that may have been in those emails accounted for, and under government control.
But right now, what's making the Clinton people and the Clinton allies nervous is they don't know whether this is going to go into the larger and more troublesome question of whether Hillary Clinton herself or people who worked for her were not as careful as they should have been in handling sensitive information. And there is potentially a crime in there if that can be shown that this was done intentionally.
GWEN IFILL: In their defense, what the Clinton people seem to be doing is establishing as much distance between the candidate herself and any controversial behavior. And also making it as confusing as possible. Because maybe voters look at it and say, like Whitewater, I just can't keep track but it makes me feel funny.
JOHN HARWOOD: The Clintons' argument is that the classified information that may have appeared in her email, her private server email, was either information that has subsequently been determined to be classified --
IFILL: Not at the time.
HARWOOD: Or was not marked as classified even if some of the information was and so that she was unwittingly exchanging perhaps information with aides on their state.gov accounts that maybe problematic. And so the FBI is trying to figure out did Russia and China hack her system? There's no evidence that that happened. But some people wonder about it. Just how -- how vulnerable was that system?
Whatever happens as a result of the information we know that her favorability has been hurt. She's underwater in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, she was minus 11 points, 30 -- I forget the exact numbers but it was double digits on the negative side. But I do know historically Bill Clinton was in double digit negative territory before his 1992 convention and turned it around.
TUMULTY: And one thing that we maybe able to stipulate here at least our reporting at the Washington Post indicates that the most questionable material that investigators have come across is not primarily -- it's not things she was sending. It's things that people were sending to her or forwarding to her, in many cases things she didn't even respond to.
HARWOOD: And in one case that was the AP. wrote about the -- information that was in a top secret category, it was based on a news article. It was about a drone program that was technically classified but it had been written about many times.
