It was an absolute given that we were going to get a CNN superpanel discussion on the recent revelation that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign were involved in funding the infamous Trump/Russia dossier. And it was just a given that the large panel would be stacked in such a way to create maximum drama and conflict.
Lo and behold, during AC360 this evening, things got heated during a conversation revolving around the dossier news. As one would expect, the conservatives on the panel — political commentators Mike Shields and Ed Martin — took the position that this was bad news for Democrats and the real Russian scandal involved Hillary. Meanwhile, liberal pundit Paul Begala played defense for the DNC and Clinton.
And then there was political analyst Kirsten Powers, who just seemed tired of the foolishness.
Having started off the discussion by hitting the campaign and DNC for “playing legal word games” after the fact, stating they should have been honest up front “because they didn’t do anything wrong.” After Martin, Begala and Shields went at it for a bit, Powers jumped back in with a flourish.
After Shields went off for a bit about how Clinton and the DNC had been caught lying for months but Begala and Powers were just dismissing it as semantics, Powers sounded off.
“Mike, are you trying to intentionally misunderstand what we said?” she responded. “It feels like you are. Let me clarify. There’s a difference between the government — that’s what I said. I don’t think you can work with a foreign government that is trying to influence the election and that’s not what happened. He’s not a spy, he’s actually a retired spy. He was hired to do this opposition research.”
Shields shot back, “Obviously they’re covering something up. Why would you lie this long about something like this?”
Watch the whole exchange above, via CNN.
[image via screengrab]
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