The news anchor asked how could it be that Hillary served as Secretary of State for four years and as the US Senator from New York for another eight years prior, but that she claimed to not know that "c" referred classified materials and her staff moved to destroy all evidence after receiving a Congressional committee subpoena by smashing phones with hammers and permanently deleting email contents.
Raddatz asked, "Don’t the American people deserve a better explanation?" Kaine claimed that the release of the FBI notes, a decision made by the agency and not by Hillary’s campaign, was her way of providing the public with more information before lobbing attacks on Donald Trump regarding his tax returns and controversial statements.
When his attempts to stonewall the questioner failed, Kaine turned his sights to Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a bid to once again insinuate that Republican nominee is a Kremlin agent. Kaine argued that Trump’s hands-off stance regarding Crimea is "just one of a number of very, very troubling instances where Trump’s coziness with Putin, his coziness with Russia – look, he’s already had to let go of one campaign chairperson, Paul Manafort, because of Manafort’s ties to pro-Russian elements in Ukraine and Russia."
In fact, Kaine argued that Donald Trump’s threat to pull press credentials for rallies and events was akin to “banning journalists from outlets he doesn’t like” and said that Trump has "taken some lessons from Putin" regarding crackdowns on freedom of speech. Of course, this ignores the fact that the Republican nominee has been much more accessible to the press whereas Hillary has not held a press conference for 274 days and has refused to answer questions of the traveling press corps.
It also exaggerates the point regarding Donald Trump’s relationship with the press, which has been adversarial, but that does not stop opposition media outlets from reporting on his candidacy.
The most outrageous statement made by potentially the next Vice President of the United States, however, was to insinuate that Donald Trump was working in league with the Russians to hack the Democratic National Committee’s computer system to expose inside dealing between Hillary’s campaign, the DNC and the mainstream media to undermine Bernie Sanders during the primary.
"A president was impeached and had to resign over an attack on the DNC during the presidential election in 1972. This is serious business," Kaine told ABC’s Martha Raddatz.
Kaine then pivoted to Trump’s joking comment that if Russia is listening, can they find the emails Hillary’s deleted State Department emails calling it "an attack that is being encouraged by Donald Trump on the DNC by Russia, similar to what led to the resignation of a president 30 years ago." Those 30,000 emails were, according to Hillary, personal emails about "yoga schedules" with no connection to either the DNC or State Department work.
Speaking with Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway following the interview with Tim Kaine, Martha Raddatz said, "You head Tim Kaine, pivoting from the e-mail questions to talking about Donald Trump, his relationship with Putin and his relationship with the press – what’s your reaction?"
Conway dismissed the Clinton campaign strategy a "very disappointing tack" in order to avoid answering questions that the American people want answered.
