It got rather heated yesterday when MSNBC host Thomas Roberts interviewed former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vermont) over whether or not Hilary Clinton’s email controversy is a made-up media obsession or a legitimate point of concern for the Democratic presidential candidate. In fact, it got so contentious between the two that Susan Del Percio, a Republican strategist, sat quietly the last eight minutes of the segment.
The argument started when the former DNC chairman said that the Clinton email controversy was “all hocus pocus,” a “skillful manipulation by the Republicans,” and that Clinton broke no laws or federal policies. Roberts interrupted saying:
[T]hey paid privately, a person that they had worked with before, in the ’08 campaign, to set up a private server. They thought about it so much, that they privately paid someone to set up a public server. Now, if you’re not thinking about it, you say, "Okay, thanks for the Blackberry, thanks for my .gov address, where’s the plane? I’ll go. What’s the diplomatic mission?" I don’t understand.
Dean shot back with his talking point about how, Colin Powell had a private email address when he was also secretary of state once. When Roberts pressed Dean on trying to explain the server, Dean said there was nothing to explain. Roberts offered up a possible explanation, telling Dean:
[W]hy not sit down in that interview and say, ‘You know, the president and I are pretty unique Americans. We’re not special, but we’ve given a life to public service, and because of our email security, we thought it was best to not make the taxpayers pay for this. We set up a private server. We actually even paid the guy to do it, and it seemed to work for us. We didn’t break any laws, and we made sure that everything has been turned over now. Why not come out, instead of these omissions that we seem to be catching Clinton in on the back end?
Dean then asked Roberts what Clinton was omitting, to which Roberts responded that the Clintons privately paid to have the server set up "that they thought about it so much that they paid him privately to set up a private server. Who does that?"
Dean’s interpretation of the matter was a “no-brainer," countering that Hillary’s husband Bill possibly couldn’t know how to set up a server, so of course they paid someone to do it, and went on to call the entire row a “press hatchet job.”
After going back and forth on the 30,000 deleted, classified, or non-classified emails, Dean threw blame on the media again:
The media has an insatiable appetite. Somebody has to say no, and she said no, to certain things. So, that’s the point of contention because you think she should say yes to everything.
Roberts countered that Dean was “mischaracterizing” the issue and that, “… it’s just about the oversight issue for the American people, and I think that’s why we see the Clinton campaign getting a little tripped up over this.”
