Hillary Clinton only apologized this week for the controversy surrounding her private State Department email system because making the occasional show of contrition is “all part of the game,” MSNBC contributor Howard Dean said Wednesday.
“This is kabuki,” the former Vermont governor said after being asked whether he still believes even after Clinton’s apology that her email controversy is “hocus pocus,” “nonsense” and “skillful manipulation” by Republicans.
“When the media wants to humble you, they do,” he added, “and she was humbled and she did the right thing. But this is not about the email server. There’s no ‘there’ there. This is about whether Hillary Clinton is going to show herself to the public as someone who’s willing to be humble in front of them, and that was the whole gig. And the media, of course, would like to put themselves in the king-maker position, which they have done.”
The former secretary of state apologized this week in an interview with ABC News for using an unauthorized and unsecured email server when she worked at the State Department, saying that it “was a mistake.”
“I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility,” she told David Muir in a “World News Tonight” interview.
Her apology comes shortly after she said in separate interviews that she felt no need to apologize for using an unauthorized server to conduct official State business. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched a criminal investigation into whether Clinton and her team sent or received classified information over the non-secure “home-brew” server.
However, despite that the FBI has opened up a criminal investigation into Clinton’s behavior, Dean maintained Wednesday that the whole scandal is a big nothing.
“I think there’s nothing to this. I never have thought that,” he said.
Asked whether he thinks Clinton apologized this week just “to appease the media,” Dean said: “This is the kind of thing you have to go through in politics. I had to go through it. Sometimes you may think that you’re in the right.”
“If the media gangs up on you and decides you’re not, sometimes you have to do things you might rather not do. But you have to. It’s all part of the game. It’s part of the presidential race, and it has been part of the presidential race since we’ve had television,” he added.
