Nancy Pelosi: Too much is being made of Clinton emails
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, thinks “much too much” has been made of Hillary Clinton’s statement to the FBI that she did did not know that the “(C)“ markings on her emails meant and speculated that they referred to “paragraphs marked in alphabetical order.”
Pelosi was asked by CBS News’ Josh Elliott whether Americans should be concerned that Clinton said she didn’t know what the markings meant.
“I think they shouldn’t be that concerned,” she said on “CBS This Morning.” “I think that the secretary of state deals with a large number of issues -- 30,000 emails -- we’re talking about a few that may have been marked ‘confidential.’ ‘Classified...’ and ‘secret’ and ‘highly sensitive’ is where it becomes more problematic.”
“The fact is that whatever it was that Hillary Clinton dealt with in that manner had no threat to our security,” Pelosi continued, “and I think that too much has been made of this.” The attention being paid to the issue, she called “a distraction” from Congress’ unfinished business.
Congress returns this week for a brief session before the November elections. There are two things it must get done -- prevent the government from shutting down on Oct. 1 by passing a short-term spending bill and provide funding for the fight against the Zika virus. The House minority leader complained that the president had asked for the resources to fight Zika in February, but “not one cent has been appropriated by Congress.”
Zika funding has been held up because Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over how much to allocate to stop the virus, whether the money should be taken from anti-Ebola efforts, and they’re also arguing about funding for contraceptive measures. Pelosi said Republicans were rejecting anything that has to do with reproduction in the bill. Zika, which has been linked to birth defects, is transmitted by mosquitoes, and by sexual contact.