Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said it was “startling” Hillary Clinton waited so long to personally address the scandal over her e-mails on Wednesday’s “Hardball” on MSNBC.
Gibbs reported that “waiting eight days to say what they said yesterday I think was startling to Democrats. I doubt there was anything that was said yesterday that couldn’t have been said last Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday and put a little bit of this story to bed a lot earlier.”
He further criticized the response of some of Clinton’s defenders, stating “I think they also didn’t understand who the stakeholders were in this, and that is the media. The media was vested, rightly, I think, in asking serious questions and they had surrogates on TV actually making it seem as if it was Republicans pushing these questions, and I think, in many ways that emboldens the media.”
Host Chris Matthews added, “there was a conflict. Last week she tweeted, near midnight one night, for the State Department to release the e-mails and now we find out that she destroyed 30,000 of them. So, how could they — how could they release 30,000 e-mails that she destroyed? It doesn’t square…this rolling disclosure is not even-minded.”
(h/t RCP Video)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett