On Monday's CNN Tonight, during a discussion of FBI Director James Comey's revelation that the agency is resuming its investigation into Hillary Clinton's email correspondence from her time as Secretary of State, CNN political analyst David Gergen fretted over Donald Trump's call to "lock her up" for criminal behavior, asserting that "nothing has been more objectionable than these cries by Donald Trump that he's going to -- if he's President, he's going to lock up Hillary Clinton. All these cries about 'Lock her up.'"
Also appearing as a guest in the same segment, CNN host Fareed Zakaria incorrectly claimed that the Whitewater investigation against Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s "never found anything wrong," even though the investigation resulted in convictions against more than a dozen people connected to the case.
At about 10:32 p.m. ET, Zakaria lamented the cases of presidential administrations being investigated under pressure from the opposition party since the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. Zakaria:
I think that part of what's gone on here -- and this is a broader trend that David knows well -- is we have criminalized public policy so that, ever since Watergate, which was an actual case of high crimes and misdemeanors, what we have done is every time your opponent does something you disagree with, there is a hunt for some way to prove that the person broke the law, that this is actually a criminal offense -- that the person should not be voted out, but should be imprisoned. That's what banana republics do.
He then dismissively recalled the Whitewater investigation against the Clintons:
And we've done it, you know, it happened with Iran-Contra and the Reagan administration. It happened, of course, with Bill Clinton. People now forget that the Whitewater prosecutor, after tens of millions of dollars, never found anything wrong in Whitewater. They ended up impeaching President Clinton for something entirely separate which had nothing to do with Whitewater. And if you set up a prosecutor against somebody and say, "Go find some crime," as Warren Buffett says, "If a cop tails you 500 miles, he will find you guilty of something." You will have broken the law by the end of that day.
Moments later, Gergen -- a former advisor for President Bill Clinton as well as Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan -- worried about the "politics of personal destruction" as he chimed in:
It does seem to me this politics of personal destruction and the criminalization of differences in politics goes back to the Watergate era, and there was a time in the Clinton years -- Bill Clinton years -- when you felt every other cabinet officer had a special prosecutor on his or her tail. It was just pretty awful. I must say, Fareed, I sort of felt that in the Obama years -- which were remarkably scandal-free -- we got away from this trend toward special prosecutors who were criminalizing everything, but now we're getting back into it.
He then brought up the possibility that a President Clinton would not be able to govern effectively as he added:
And nothing has been more objectionable than these cries by Donald Trump that he's going to -- if he's President, he's going to lock up Hillary Clinton. All these cries about "Lock her up," I really think are leading us back down a bad path, and I'm not sure it's going to cost any votes, at this point, Don. We'll have to wait and see. But it's going to make it much more difficult for her to govern. And that -- at the end of the day, we need a President who can govern effectively.
