When the PBS NewsHour turned to its Friday week-in-review segment with staff pundits David Brooks and Mark Shields, both the pseudoconservative and the liberal agreed that FBI director James Comey’s non-indictment of Hillary Clinton this week was a damaging blow to her credibility. But then Shields said something bizarre.
Clinton appeared for an interview with NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff where she doubled down on all her lies about her e-mail practices. Shields professed shock, since he thought “I thought there was going to be a start of almost a candor offensive.”
What, in the entire history of Hillary Clinton subjecting herself to liberal-media interviews, would give Shields the idea that now, after all this time in public life, she was going on a "candor offensive"? How naive can that sound at the very moment her dramatic lack of any shred of candor is exposed?
MARK SHIELDS: This is a real problem. It's been a problem, lack of transparency and forthrightness, all the way back to the Rose [Law] Firm's billing records some 20 years ago in the White House. And I thought that there was going to be a start of almost a candor offensive, the fact that she was doing the interview with you.
And I just think it's time for frankness and an acknowledgment that this was wrong, that they were misleading. And to me, it's not going to go away.
Brooks said if she had “real opposition” instead of Donald Trump, this would be devastating:
DAVID BROOKS: I agree with both sides of Comey’s conclusion, that she shouldn’t be charged, but that, basically, the defense she has given us and for all these months was a tissue of lies, that she didn’t have one device, she sent over 100 classified things, she had multiple servers, and that her staff didn’t even look at some of the — some of the things they deleted as personal, some of the e-mails were actually business.
And so she’s told a series of falsehoods. And, frankly, I thought her reaction tonight was a little off-tone, a little too defiant, when a little humility and a little contrition might be in order, given what Comey said, completely accurately. And so, if she had real opposition, this would have been devastating for her.
Brooks drew laughs for insisting sometimes in his speeches, Donald Trump “veers into full drunk wedding toast mode.”
