With the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal ongoing, on Tuesday, NBC’s Today and CBS This Morning assured viewers that the Democratic front-runner was in no “legal jeopardy.”
On Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie asked Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd: “I mean, the central accusation, what people are worried about, is did she mishandle classified information?...is there a smoking gun on that issue?” Todd replied: “No, there's not. There is not the whole ‘knowingly,’ and remember, ‘knowingly’ is the key word here. Whether she knowingly passed around classified information in an unclassified setting. There is no evidence to suggest that, that story doesn't hold up.”
Todd added:
...while she may be out of legal jeopardy as far as this release is concerned, there’s still the political aspect....And it is a reminder, how is this more convenient to have your own home-brew system?...I actually think that excuse is the one that's the least believable. I still think the most logical explanation is she was trying to get out of congressional action and Freedom of Information Act requests.
Fill-in co-host Willie Geist wondered about Clinton blaming the media for the scandal:
The Clinton campaign and its surrogates have taken great pains to point out, they say, this is a media-driven story, that this is a partisan story from Republicans in Congress who want to do damage to her, prevent her from becoming president. Do you see evidence now, though, inside the campaign that they view this as a real problem?
Todd responded: “No, they do now. And I think they – what they view is they know they have a perception problem among other Democrats, Democratic elites....So I think you’re going to see a little bit of an attempt by the campaign to appease nervous Democrats.”
In a report on CBS This Morning, correspondent Nancy Cordes touted an attorney who saw no legal problems for Clinton:
BRADLEY MOSS: Well she likely be prosecuted for it? Probably not.
CORDES: Lawyer Bradley Moss who specializes in national security cases says he hasn't seen anything yet that would put Clinton in legal jeopardy.
MOSS: What you have is information that is now being deemed classified by certain parts of the government, State Department is disputing some aspects of that and so it's not quite clear that she should have known this was classified, let alone if it was, in fact, classified at the time.
Moments later, co-host Norah O’Donnell asked Bloomberg Politics editor John Heilemann: “The distinction that more than a hundred of these e-mails contained classified information versus being marked classified, an important distinction?” Heilemann argued: “I think as a common sense thing it’s an important distinction for a lot of voters because they will ask the question how could she be expected to know if it’s classified if there is not a stamp on the top of it?”
In an earlier question, fellow co-host Gayle King posed: “[Clinton] said the other day that nobody really cares about this but you guys, meaning the media. Do you think that’s true and do you think this is hurting her at all?”
Heilemann declared:
Well, we polled this question too on the Democratic side of our poll. And it turns out most Democrats say it's not a big issue. It's obviously an issue with the broader electorates as you can see from her very bad numbers in terms of honest and trustworthy where she is really in trouble in the broader electorate. With Iowa Democrats it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal. But I will say that when I was out at the Iowa State Fair I had a lot of Iowa Democrats who asked me, not because they thought there was a scandal but who asked the question is this going to hurt her in the general election? Is this going to be some piece of baggage she has to deal with going forward? So it's on people's minds.
On ABC’s Good Morning America, fill-in co-host Amy Robach noted that Clinton’s “critics” were “calling it a national security scandal.” However, none of those critics were featured in the report that followed.
