Is there a difference between Hillary Clinton lying and simply being wrong?
Jul 27, 2016, 7:20 AM
When CBS News anchor Scott Pelley asked Hillary Clinton in February whether she had always told the American people the truth, Clinton responded: “I’ve always tried to. Always.”
Pelley said polls showed the public didn’t seem to believe her. So he asked again over the weekend, to which Clinton responded: “I think if you look at my public service, I have been as straight forward and honest as I could be.”
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Following Benghazi and a pair of email scandals, KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson finds the answers laughable. But he asked Pelley at the Democratic National Convention for his perception on Clinton’s responses.
“It doesn’t matter what I think, Dori,” Pelley said. “I think a lot of people in the audience weren’t impressed with the answer.”
Pelley believes Clinton was surprised by the question in February.
“I think she truly feels like she shouldn’t have to answer questions about her truthfulness because I think she believes that she has been truthful,” he said. “And so she’s a little bit annoyed by the questions.”
When Pelley asked her pretty much the same question alongside her running mate Sunday, she again wasn’t too pleased.
“She said, ‘Scott, you’ve done this to me before.’ And I said, ‘I know you don’t like this, but 67 percent of the American people in our CBS news poll think that she’s not trustworthy,’” he said. “That’s the biggest hill she has to climb. In my personal opinion, if she loses this election, that will be why. So, in my view, it’s something she needs to address and so I’m going to keep asking her about it so she can address it.”
Dori noted that there were multiple instances of potential lies related to the FBI’s search through thousands of emails Clinton sent on an unsecured server while working as secretary of state. Pelley, however, said that he’s not sure those assumptions are correct.
“There’s a difference between lying and just being wrong,” Pelley said. “One of the things the FBI director told congress was that Hillary Clinton is not very sophisticated – to use his words – when it comes to technical matters. They found she had a great lack of sophistication. I think when she came out and said no confidential information was exchanged on that email server, I think there was a real possibility that she didn’t know the difference.”
“The FBI director also said that none of the emails that contained classified information had the proper heading on them that warned there was classified information contained therein,” he said. “He acknowledged that as well. So there’s a difference between lying — knowing that you’re not telling the truth — and saying something in a news conference that just turns out to be wrong. And I suspect that may be what happened.”