Barack
Obama has said there is no political influence in any investigation into Hillary
Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.
“I
guarantee there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the
Justice Department or the FBI,” Obama said. “Guaranteed. Period.”
Obama,
who also said Clinton “would never intentionally put America in any kind of
jeopardy”, was speaking in a pre-recorded interview with Fox News Sunday host
Chris Wallace, his first with the conservative-slanted channel since January
2014.
He
also discussed his administration’s policy and success on terror – seeking to
contrast it with inflammatory statements from Republican presidential
candidates – and his nomination of a judge to succeed Antonin Scalia on the US
supreme court.
Clinton’s
emails are the subject of an FBI investigation, and the issue has dogged her on
the campaign trail and in polls as she seeks to succeed Obama in the White
House.
Obama
pointed to a problem of semantics in how the government does its business.
“I
handle a lot of classified information,” he said. “There’s classified and then
there’s classified. There’s stuff that is really ‘top secret’ top secret, and
there’s stuff going out to the president or secretary of state, stuff you don’t
want on the transom, or going out over the wires” that is basically
“open-sourced” material.
“I
also think it is important to keep this in perspective,” Obama said. “This is
somebody who has served her country for four years as secretary of state, and
did an outstanding job.”
He
added, though, that Clinton herself had acknowledged her use of the server was
a mistake: “There’s a carelessness in terms of managing emails that she has
owned.”
Wallace
also questioned the president about terrorism and the threat of attacks on the
US and Americans abroad.
“I
don’t think we make too big a deal of the terror threat,” Obama said. “My No1
priority is going after Isil,” he added, using an acronym for the Islamic State
militant group. “My point is how we do it is important. That we have to make
sure that we abide by our laws. We have to make sure that we abide by our
values.”
Obama
then criticized Republican candidates for president.
In a
reference to Ted Cruz, he said: “When I hear some candidates saying we should carpet-bomb
innocent civilians, that is not a productive solution.”
Regarding
Donald Trump, he said: “When I hear someone saying that we should ban all
Muslims from entering the country, that is not a good solution.”
“There
isn’t a president who has taken more terrorists off the map,” Obama said. “I’m
the guy who calls the families, or meets with them or hugs them or tries to
comfort a mom or a dad or a husband or a kid after a terrorist attack … this is
my No1 job.”
He
then repeated an argument he made after last month’s Brussels attacks, which
occurred while he was on a historic diplomatic trip to Cuba: “It has been my
view consistently [that] the job of the terrorists in their minds is to induce
panic, induce fear, get societies to change you they are.”
But,
he said: “You can’t change us. You can kill some of us, but we will hunt you
down and we will get you. And in the meantime, just as we did in Boston after
the marathon bombing, we’re going to go to a ball game. That’s the message of
resilience.”
The
interview was taped at the University of Chicago Law School, where Obama taught
for a decade and recently spoke about his supreme court nomination, Merrick
Garland. Wallace asked about that issue first: Republican opposition to any
hearing for any nominee.
“I
think that things’ll evolve as people get familiar with Judge Garland’s
record,” Obama said, “as it becomes apparent that the overwhelming majority of
the American people believe that the president nominates somebody to the
supreme court and the Senate should do its job and give him a hearing.
“The
questioning that’s being done privately with Judge Garland should be done
publicly, in a hearing. Democrats and Republicans have gotten into a fix inside
the Senate in which the confirmation promise becomes too much of a tit for tat.
“Never
has a Republican president’s nominee not received a hearing, not received a
vote. I don’t object to Republicans saying ‘Merrick Garland may be a fine man,
may be a fine judge, but I disagree with him philosophically.’ I think if they
go through the process they won’t have a rationale to defeat him.”
Obama
said he would stand with Garland through to the end of his term, no matter what
the Senate did or who won the presidential election.
Reference: theguardian
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