Hillary Clinton pays a price for ‘extreme carelessness’ with emails
Hillary Clinton is relieved that the Justice Department is not going to indict her for using private email servers that put top-secret information at risk. That is a bit like a bull rider at a rodeo feeling happy the raging animal broke two of his legs, smashed six ribs and crushed his skull but didn’t kill him. Sure, the worst didn’t happen, but neither Hillary nor the bull rider is walking away unscathed.
In a 15-minute announcement Tuesday, FBI Director James B. Comey said his agency’s investigation of the former secretary of State’s mishandled email did not find sufficient grounds to bring charges against Clinton, but he accused her and her assistants of being “extremely careless” with classified communications that could have been easily hacked by foreign agents. Comey also undermined Clinton’s version of events, thereby reinforcing a broad public perception that she is not an entirely truthful person.
Where Clinton had claimed she chose to use a single private server for the sake of convenience, Comey indicated she had actually used several private devices. Where Clinton had claimed only emails with personal information had been deleted by her staff before her messages were turned over to the government, Comey said the FBI found that a number of messages concerning official business had been dumped. Most damning of all, where Clinton had asserted that no messages passed through her private server that were classified at the time they were sent or received, Comey said the FBI found 110 messages that were, indeed, classified when Clinton had them in her system.
There are probably at least a few Democrats — from Bernie Sanders fans to boosters of Vice President Joe Biden — who are thinking they would have been better off had Clinton been indicted. Then, the party could have pushed her aside and nominated a candidate for president whose negatives are not so disturbingly high. Now, Democrats must rest their hopes on the fact that the Republican nominee is even more disliked by the electorate. In a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 53% of respondents said they had a negative view of Clinton, while 60% viewed Donald Trump poorly. Perhaps even more significantly, 61% of those polled expressed alarm about the 2016 presidential race.
There’s plenty of reason for Democrats to be alarmed. In a normal political year, they would be romping to victory over a narcissistic celebrity businessman who provokes outrage every time he opens his mouth or spews out a tweet. Instead, millions of American voters are attracted to the man’s total lack of governmental experience and disturbingly simplistic views about the global economy and international affairs, thus leaving him only a few points behind in national polls. Meanwhile, despite her impressive resume and potential to make gender history, the Democrats’ standard-bearer is repeatedly tripped up by controversies big and small and past misjudgments that come back to haunt her.
Rather than riding high on their own candidate’s appeal, Democrats must count on Trump to do something so supremely offensive that voters in pivotal swing states will be scared into casting their unenthusiastic ballots for “extremely careless” Clinton in November.
Follow me at @davidhorsey on Twitter
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