During her lone Sunday morning talk show interview one day after Super Saturday, Hillary Clinton shocked CBS’s Face the Nation host John Dickerson when she exclaimed how she’s “delighted” that former State Department staffer Bryan Pagliano has been granted immunity to cooperate with the FBI’s investigation of her private e-mail server.
Dickerson initially asked part way through the interview about Pagliano and how he’s “talked to Democrats and they worry that somebody is going to get indicted.”
Clinton immediately rebuffed those concerns and griped: “Well, there is no basis for that. It's a security review. I'm delighted that he has agreed to cooperate, as everyone else has and I think that we’ll be moving toward a resolution of this[.]”
With this answer, Dickerson became visibly puzzled and twice asked Clinton to confirm to him that she truly “see[s] this as good news.”
The scandal-ridden candidate rehashed her oft-used talking point about equating her private server to the handfuls of e-mails sent by her predecessors using private addresses but largely reiterated that there’s nothing to see her that would incriminate her:
Yeah, I do. Absolutely. I think we're getting closer and closer to wrapping this up. I also know that there were reports today about the hundreds of officials and the thousand e-mails that they were sending back and forth that have been looked at and classified retroactively. This really raises serious questions about this whole process, I think.
(h/t: Washington Free Beacon’s David Rutz)
The relevant portion of the transcript from CBS’s Face the Nation on March 6 can be found below.
CBS’s Face the Nation
March 6, 2016
10:43 a.m. EasternJOHN DICKERSON: Let me ask you a question about something that was in the news this week. Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department staffer, was granted immunity from prosecution in the criminal investigation into your e- mail server and when this happened, I talked to Democrats and they worry that somebody is going to get indicted.
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, there is no basis for that. It's a security review. I'm delighted that he has agreed to cooperate, as everyone else has and I think that we’ll be moving toward a resolution of this, because, after all —
DICKERSON: So, you see this as — you see this as good news?
CLINTON: I'm sorry. What, John?
DICKERSON: You see this as good news?
CLINTON: Yeah, I do. Absolutely. I think we're getting closer and closer to wrapping this up. I also know that there were reports today about the hundreds of officials and the thousand e-mails that they were sending back and forth that have been looked at and classified retroactively. This really raises serious questions about this whole process, I think. Colin Powell summed it up well when he was told that some of his e-mails from more than 10 years ago were going to be retroactively classified. He called it an absurdity, so, I'm hoping that we’ll get through this, and then everybody can take a hard look at the interagency disputes and the arguments over retroactive classification. Remember, I'm the one who asked that all my e-mails be made public. I have been more transparent than anybody I can think of in public life, but it's also true that when something is made public, everybody from across the government gets to weigh in and that's what's happening here and we need to get it sorted out and then take action from there.
