Martin O’Malley Refuses to Say if Hillary Is Honest and Trustworthy

STEPHANOPOULOS: “OK. One other [indecipherable] about Hillary Clinton. You have said that this whole issue of emails is a distraction, a distraction from the campaign. You’ve refused to take it on so far. But I want to show you some poll numbers that came up this week from the Quinnipiac poll from key states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. They were asked, is Hillary Clinton honest and trustworthy? Sixty percent in Ohio said no. Sixty-four percent Florida. Sixty-three percent in Pennsylvania said no. You just heard Scott Walker call it — say Hillary Clinton would be the “deceiver-in-chief.”
Do you believe she is honest and trustworthy?”
O’MALLEY: “This is why, George, we need to have debates, because so long as our Democratic Party is not talking about the issues that matter most around the kitchen table, the only question that will be asked every day, and it’s a legitimate question, by media people like yourself, or by the Republicans, are questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Those are questions that I will leave to her and to her lawyers to answer. But as a party, we need to wake up and we need to have start having debates about the issues that really matter, like making college more affordable for more families, making wages go up and not down, making the investments that allow us to move to a 100 percent clean energy future as a nation so we can square our shoulders to the challenge of climate change.
Until we start having debates, and offering those ideas that move our country forward, we’re going to be bogged down in questions of, what did Hillary Clinton know and when did she know it?
And we cannot allow our party to be branded by those sorts of questions of the past. We have to look to the future. And we have to offer the ideas that move our country forward for the future.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “Real quick —“
O’MALLEY: “That’s why these debates are so important.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “Do you think you can convince the DNC to add more debates?”
O’MALLEY: “I think the DNC will become convinced and say, look, the poll numbers that you just put up there that we’re really hurting ourselves by not putting forward the ideas that serve our national interest.
The new ideas and the new generation of leadership that people are looking for is going to be found in the Democratic Party, not the hate-mongers of the Republican Party. We need to offer these ideas.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “Governor O’Malley, thanks for your time this morning.”
O’MALLEY: "Thank you, George."