Yahoo News Special Report: Keith Olbermann on the race for the White House
Sports and political commentator Keith Olbermann spoke with Yahoo News Guest Anchor Paul Beban about the 2016 election, the rise of Donald Trump and the Hillary Clinton email controversy.
When asked about his stream of negative tweets directed at Trump, Olbermann said, “We have to acknowledge that what he’s done in this campaign has been certainly the most extraordinary presidential candidacy since at least the guy who ran against Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War and got 45 percent of the vote.” He continued, “It’s an extraordinary event, and it requires extraordinary attention. And there has to be somebody in the back throwing metaphorical rocks at him, and that’s me.”
Olbermann said that Trump hurts himself when he doesn’t let stories, such as the FBI investigation into Clinton’s handling of emails while she was secretary of state, breathe in the news cycle. “That email announcement from James Comey is presumably the low point, certainly the low point to date, of the Clinton campaign, and maybe ultimately the low point of the whole campaign through November. And instead of just sitting back and going, ‘OK, see.’… he then moved on to isn’t it great how Saddam Hussein handled terrorism in his own country by simply killing the terrorists. Which implies that this might be something he might want to emulate here. And now, the whole email story is gone.”
He also weighed in on the Chilcot report, which criticized Britain and, particularly, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s role in the war in Iraq. Olbermann said that his reaction is “one of sadness that it’s taken this period of time to recognize that the information was flawed.” He added, “I think it’s good that the British people get to read that. We don’t have a system in which something like that is done. We should. We should have an investigation like that. … Something on the record that says, ‘No, this should be a lesson to future Americans. Do not assume when it comes to picking up a gun and dropping a bomb. You may, in fact, be deceiving yourselves, and you may be deceiving the public.”
