The verbal haymaker Democratic strategist James Carville lobbed at Rep. Louie Gohmert over the Hillary Clinton email scandal has backfired spectacularly, Gohmert tells
Newsmax TV.
In an interview Sunday on ABC-TV, Carville, a longtime confidante of the Clinton family, defended Hillary's use of a private email account for government business. He cheekily added, “I suspect she didn’t want Louie Gohmert rifling through her e-mails, which seems to me to be a kind of reasonable position for someone to take."
But Gohmert told "The Steve Malzberg Show" the Carville crack was a colossal faux pas.
"We've all heard of gaffes. In Washington, a gaffe is when you accidentally tell the truth. That's exactly what James Carville did. He accidentally told the truth," Gohmert said on Tuesday.
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"[Clinton] did not want any congressional oversight — that was the bottom line. It was a gaffe when he accidentally spoke the truth. She didn't want anybody to be able to look over her emails.
"But unfortunately for her, it is something that is required of Congress, to have oversight."
The former secretary of state has been under fire since it was revealed she used a private email account for government business during her four years at the agency.
Clinton, the presumed Democratic candidate for the 2016 presidential race, recently handed over 30,000 emails related to government business as required. But she deleted about 32,000 others she said personal.
That has had GOP lawmakers howling in protest and
Politico reports that Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus plans to probe whether Clinton violated a State Department separation agreement that she return all official documents when she left the agency.
Gohmert believes Clinton crossed the line.
"When she was a senator, it was important that she have a phone that was dedicated only for campaign things because you can't use a government phone for campaign or personal stuff, and then you have a government phone," he said.
"But she blended the two [as secretary of state] and when you're in an appointed office, you don't have to worry about a campaign, you're just in government service. Those should not have been private, those should've been public.
"When you find out that there were all these terrible things happen like Benghazi — and she has a long period of silence there — then you know she had communications going somewhere that she decided not to disclose."
Gohmert — a Texas Republican who serves on the House Judiciary Committee and chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security — says the State's Department's declaration Tuesday that it could not find Clinton's separation agreement is doublespeak.
"As a former judge, I would look at the words 'they have no records.' They didn't say she didn't sign it and they didn't say we didn't have somebody to destroy something, we're just saying right now we do not have one that we can find," Gohmert said.
"They should've been able to say either she did or she didn't. If she did, there would be people who knew she did. There would be witnesses who could verify that she did and then they can say we know she signed one, there are witnesses, but we can't find it."
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