On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” National Journal Senior Political Columnist Ron Fournier said that senior officials for Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have told him “trust doesn’t matter,” and that she’s “knowingly” deceiving the public about her email.
Fournier said he “pulled out the last of my hair” watching Clinton’s interview on “Fox News Sunday” because “she was parsing, she was talking about the fact that he said she didn’t lie to the FBI. And I’m like, you know, this is not the day and age to be parsing, and a parse is another word for a lie, because she’s knowingly misleading. She did violate policy. We know that. She did expose US secrets on a rogue server. We know that.”
He added, “Why underscore what the one thing is that’s holding her back from being president, which is how dishonest she’s been about the scandal? … Why go back to the 1990s, and do a Clintonian parse, that might have worked when there was gatekeepers and it was a different political environment? It doesn’t work now, when every member of the public has access to what she has said before, has access to the records that show that what she did was wrong and against policy. I just — I don’t get it. You know what really frustrates me is, all the Democrats who call people like me frustrated with Clinton, and I want to tell them, I did with this column, stop calling me, call Brooklyn. Tell them to quit lying, and you quit covering for her. Force her to do the right thing so that you can win this race.”
Fournier further stated, “I literally had senior officials, on the record — not on the record, on background, a year ago — more than a year ago, saying that trust doesn’t matter, that Bill Clinton won even though he was trusted less than the two people he ran against. What they don’t realize is the world has changed, and we now see that trust does matter. It’s really destroyed her credibility. Now, she could still win, even by continuing this parsing and this lying, but then she’s going to be leading a country where two-thirds of the people don’t trust her. And you can’t transform our politics. You can’t do half of the things that she wants to do, that need to be done, if people don’t trust her. So, that’s the miscalculation they’re making. They’re only worried about winning this news cycle. They’re only worried about winning on Election Day. they’re not thinking about what you’re doing to undermine, not just her credibility, but credibility in our political system and the Democratic Party.”
Fournier concluded, “[H]ere’s where they’re coming from. They have been under attack for 30 years now. A lot of it is self-inflicted, but much of it isn’t. For example, Vince Foster, I knew Vince Foster, good man, decent man, cared about his country, cared about the Clintons. He had some mental issues. Unfortunately, he killed himself. It was a tragedy for his family. It was a tragedy for the Clintons. And the Clintons have been accused of murdering him. That’s going to create some kind of scar tissue. And a lot of these scandals are self-inflicted, but many of them are not. So, you get to the point where you’re paranoid, and partly because, people are out to get you. You’ve been burned when you disclosed information. And they have a sense of self-righteousness. they really believe what they’re doing is the right thing for the state, when I was in Arkansas, or the country, and therefore, the ends justify the means. A lot of that worked in the old days when you could convince the gatekeepers that, hey, we’re the right guys, we’re doing the right things, give us a pass. Nowadays, man, it’s, as you know, it’s a cowboy mentality with communications, and they’re being burned by 300 million reporters, who are looking at things differently.”
(h/t Real Clear Politics)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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