Clinton savors triumph, but email probe clouds
her campaign

Published: June 8, 2016 11:28 a.m. ET

Trump already pouncing on her use of private server, Clinton Foundation donations


Hillary Clinton has won, but the threat of an indictment for mishandling emails while secretary of state will dog her campaign.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Hillary Clinton is basking in the glory of claiming an historic nomination to the presidency, but the question remains to what extent the possibility of an indictment over her email practices has damaged her campaign.

An indictment would likely disqualify her from running, if not legally because of the presumption of innocence, then almost certainly politically.

But at this point, after months of investigation by dozens of agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the failure of the Justice Department to take any action over her violation of protocols for handling classified information would be seen as a political whitewash.

And that could even be worse for Democrats because Clinton would then be running under a cloud of suspicion that the Republicans would exploit to the hilt.

A corollary to this is that whatever else Loretta Lynch does during her tenure, she will be remembered only as the attorney general who did or did not indict Clinton after it emerged that hundreds of emails containing classified information were exposed to hacking through her use of a personal server.

Clinton herself continues to stonewall the issue, baldly repeating claims that it was allowed and that her predecessors had done the same thing even though last month’s report from the State Department’s inspector general has debunked them.

However, the buzz about a possible indictment is not a creation of a right-wing conspiracy or left-wing critics like Susan Sarandon, but the result of the investigation itself, including a Clinton aide taking the Fifth Amendment unless he gets immunity for cooperating.

The controversy has had a corrosive effect on Clinton’s favorability rating, especially the key attribute of trustworthiness, and there is no reason for that to stop with a primary victory.

Even though Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, has repeatedly declined to make the email controversy a campaign issue, it clearly figures in his calculation to keep the contest open until the national convention in late July.

Jane Sanders, the candidate’s wife, indicated as much when she said recently it would be nice if the FBI could hurry up with its investigation.
Fox News likes to call the email investigation the FBI primary, because the bureau’s decision on whether to recommend an indictment could end up trumping all of Clinton’s pledged delegates and superdelegates.

If the FBI decides not to make the recommendation to indict, or the Justice Department declines to follow one, it would be hard to give these decisions enough spin to be credible after all the expert commentary on the mishandling of classified information at the core of the investigation.

There is also the further threat that emails shielded from Freedom of Information Act requests by the use of a private server and subsequently deleted without any outside review could have contained information about donations to the Clinton Foundation that represented clear conflicts of interest with Clinton’s official activities.

Trump signaled this line of attack on Monday with his charge that Clinton used the State Department as a “private hedge fund” for her family foundation.

“Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund,” Trump said in his victory speech after Tuesday’s primaries. “The Russians, the Saudis, the Chinese all gave money to Bill and Hillary and got favorable treatment in return.”

The Republicans’ presumptive nominee said he would have further details in a major speech next week on how “the Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves.”

The staging of Clinton’s victory speech Tuesday night — to celebrate her apparent clinching of the nomination as an historic watershed for women’s rights without any ifs, ands or buts — was in part designed to make the email controversy seem irrelevant in this grand sweep of history.

Not only will such alternative-universe staging not deter Trump, the boos that greeted Sanders’s mention of Clinton during his speech also suggested that the presumptive nominee will have difficulty rallying Sanders’s supporters behind her.

It is far from certain that the millions who voted for Sanders precisely because he campaigned against the establishment will now docilely fall in line behind the establishment candidate.

They don’t have to accept that Clinton is now the only viable choice, and could decide to vote for Trump — or for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson or Jill Stein of the Green Party — or, more likely, sit out the election.

Trump once again made a pitch Tuesday night for the Sanders’s supporters. “To all of those Bernie Sanders voters who have been left out in the cold by a rigged system of superdelegates, we welcome you with open arms,” he said.

Echoing Sanders’s rhetoric, he continued, “I’m going to be America’s champion. Because you see, this election isn’t about Republican or Democrat, it’s about who runs this country. The special interests or the people, and I mean, American people.”

Sanders himself remained defiant Tuesday night even though his hoped-for late primary surge failed to materialize, conceding nothing and offering no olive branch for party unity.

With more than six weeks to go before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, he may wait to see what impact the FBI primary will have on the contest.

Trump, for his part, has shown he will continue to hammer away at the email server and the Clinton Foundation.

“Secretary Clinton even did all of the work on a totally illegal private server,” he said Tuesday night, referring to his allegations that Clinton sold favors in exchange for foundation donations. “Something that how she’s getting away with nobody understands. Designed to keep her corrupt dealings out of the public record, putting the security of the entire country at risk, and a president in a corrupt system is totally protecting her. Not right.”

Clinton should savor her nomination victory — and the post-primary bump she will get in the polls — but her campaign will be clouded going forward by a looming indictment, even if it never comes.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cli...ign-2016-06-08