On Wednesday’s broadcast of “MSNBC Live,” host Stephanie Ruhle played a montage of FBI Director James Comey contradicting Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statements before the Benghazi Select Committee and asked Representative Matt Cartwright (D-PA), “How is that not perjury?”
Ruhle said that while FBI Director James Comey said that Clinton didn’t do anything with her emails that merited prosecution, “[I]t’s not like he gave her a stellar review and an A+.” After playing a montage contrasting Clinton’s statements to the Benghazi Select Committee with FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before Congress, in which Comey said that multiple statements Clinton gave to Congress weren’t true, Ruhle asked, “How is that not perjury?”
Cartwright responded, “Here’s what we established, when I questioned Director Comey. The question was, well, were there things marked classified that she sent or received? And out of the tens of thousands of emails that they were reviewing, only three of them had any markings whatsoever suggesting a possible classification, and I — there’s a clip from that I wish you guys would run –.”
Ruhle then cut in, “But only three is not zero. … You either did it or you didn’t do it. No?”
Cartwright answered, “What we’re talking about is we have three emails that had little cs buried in the text someplace. I had the manual, and I showed Director Comey the manual, and the manual for classifying documents makes it very clear, that if you’re going to classify something, there has to be a header that says ‘Top secret,’ or ‘Classified,’ or “Confidential,” or one of the levels of classification, there has to be a header on the document, and the absence of those headers would have told somebody who understood this system that these — immediately that these documents are not classified. I put that question to Director Comey with, and he said, yes, that would be a reasonable inference that anything not bearing a header is not classified. So, if we talk about three documents, that, by the way, Hillary Clinton did not send, she received, that have a little c, which would indicate confidential, the lowest level of classification, somewhere in the text, that would be an improper classification marking, and the absence of a header would tell her that that is not classified information. so Director Comey said that very plainly. and i have to say, it’s a stretch to continue beating this dead horse.”
(h/t GOP War Room)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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