Carville on Clinton reaction: She didn't want GOP snooping

Democratic operative James Carville’s attempt to tamp down talk of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal may have instead added more fuel to the fire.

Carville, who worked on the presidential campaigns of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Hillary’s use of a private email account during her time as secretary of atate was legal and likely an attempt to avoid congressional oversight.


“I suspect she didn’t want Louie Gohmert riffling through her emails, which seems to me to be a kind of reasonable position for someone to take,” Carville said, referring to the Texas Republican congressman. “So, just like everything else before it, it amounts to nothing but a bunch of people flapping they jaws about nothing.”

Hillary Clinton told reporters at a packed press conference last Wednesday that about 30,000 of the emails from the private account were deleted for privacy reasons after a team of lawyers determined them to be unrelated to her official duties. The rest, she said, were handed over to the State Department.

Despite the media-feeding frenzy the email controversy has created, Carville attempted to downplay public interest in the scandal.

“You wonder why the public is not following this? Because they know what it is,” he said, implying that the scandal was driven more by politics than any actual wrongdoing.