Thread: A More Personal Hillary Clinton Tries to Erase a Trust Deficit

A More Personal Hillary Clinton Tries to Erase a Trust Deficit

JULY 8, 2016


Hillary Clinton after a campaign event Wednesday in Atlantic City. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

For most of her presidential campaign, whenever Hillary Clinton has been confronted with polls showing that a majority of voters do not trust her, she has attributed the problem to decades of wild Republican attacks and right-wing conspiracy theories.

Last week, speaking to a sympathetic crowd in Chicago, she also pointed a finger in a surprising new direction: at herself.

“I personally know I have work to do on this front; a lot of people tell pollsters they don’t trust me,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech to the Rainbow/Push Coalition on June 27. “It is certainly true I have made mistakes,” she said a moment later, adding, “So I understand people having questions.”

The questions grew far more intense after the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey Jr., on Tuesday bluntly contradicted numerous statements Mrs. Clinton and her aides had made over the past year in defending her email practices as secretary of state.

Though Mr. Comey’s stark critique of her actions as “extremely careless” came after he recommended that she not be criminally charged, it cast a harsh light on perhaps the central challenge to Mrs. Clinton and her campaign: how to get skeptical voters to trust her.

Yet the snippet of introspection last week from Mrs. Clinton, a candidate not known for public soul-searching, may have signaled an important shift in how she and her campaign hope to do just that.

“You can’t just talk someone into trusting you,” she told her audience. “You’ve got to earn it.”

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers say there is little she can do to address this trust deficit head-on. While a candidate seen as unprepared could give speeches and interviews to demonstrate intellectual and policy heft, and intimate, folksy events could help address likability issues, distrust is not something that a week of themed events or a rollout of new proposals can correct.

“There’s no magic set of words you can say to wash all that away,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a campaign spokeswoman, who was referring specifically to Republican attacks, not to Mrs. Clinton’s own acts, as having eroded trust.

“Once she has the job,” Ms. Palmieri added, “her performance, and how hard she works for the people she represents, quells those doubts.”

So Mrs. Clinton will not bluntly ask voters to trust her, aides said. Instead, she will try to own up to the fact that many voters do not, and will discuss this in more personal terms, depending on the setting and audience.

At the same time, aides said, Mrs. Clinton will try to build, or rebuild, trust with voters by demonstrating competence and a devotion to policies that are important to them, like making college more affordable, achieving equal pay for women, and enacting paid family and medical leave.

For Mrs. Clinton, that means emphasizing how she won over skeptical New Yorkers when she ran for the Senate in 2000 after having just moved to the state. “A lot of voters had doubts about me,” she said in the Chicago speech. “I delivered for people, and they learned they could count on me to fight for them. And in the end, I earned their trust.”

Trust is not a problem exclusive to Mrs. Clinton: Never have polls shown the presumptive nominees of both major parties so distrusted or disliked. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that only 45 percent of voters considered the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, honest and trustworthy; just 37 percent said so of Mrs. Clinton.

The nearest comparison to her predicament may involve Richard M. Nixon, who polished his image before successfully reintroducing himself to voters in 1968. “He did it by focusing on all the things he brought to the table: foreign policy experience and a different approach to Johnson on Vietnam,” said Kenneth L. Khachigian, a speechwriter for Nixon and later Ronald Reagan.

Yet the time for reintroductions is long past, and opinions about Mrs. Clinton are arguably even more entrenched. Even the brochure at the Chicago luncheon referred to the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals and described Mrs. Clinton as “the only first lady to have been subpoenaed.” (A Rainbow/PUSH spokesman told The Chicago Tribune that a volunteer’s “brain freeze” was to blame.)

“Realistically speaking, it is pretty hard in today’s media and political environment for the well-defined candidate to significantly lift up how voters perceive them on trust,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster and senior adviser to Priorities USA Action, a “super PAC” supporting Mrs. Clinton.

“Voters are much more inclined to believe the bad things they hear about a political figure than the good things,” he said.

Showing contrition so close to the election could also ring hollow: It took months after the email scandal broke for Mrs. Clinton to admit she had made a mistake.

Mrs. Clinton’s trust problem is also different from Mr. Trump’s, polls show.

In the most recent New York Times-CBS News poll, some 62 percent of registered voters said Mrs. Clinton said what she thought people wanted to hear most of the time, rather than what she believed, compared with 39 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.

“It’s more like she’s saying things because they’re politically correct or because they further her agenda, rather than because it’s coming from the heart,” said Alan Podmore, 53, of West Hills, Calif.

Even her supporters tell pollsters that they do not trust her, a weakness Republicans identified early and have tried to capitalize on for more than a year. Voters often cite the emails or her paid speeches to Wall Street banks as reasons for their distrust, but they also point to past Clinton scandals and to a vague gut feeling that she has never been completely truthful.

“It goes all the way back to when she was first lady,” said Misty Leach, 43, a high school teacher in McDonough, Ga. “I remember her going on TV about the Monica Lewinsky thing and saying, ‘It was just a Republican conspiracy to get my husband.’ No, it wasn’t.”

Mrs. Clinton must also tread carefully in asking voters to trust her as a policy maker while forgiving or setting aside mistakes like the email imbroglio. Thanks to Mr. Comey, Republicans can now argue more persuasively that she neglected the public interest, took risks with national security and broke faith with voters.

“Hillary Clinton has spent the last 16 months looking into cameras deliberately lying to the American people,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The Democratic convention in Philadelphia this month will present Mrs. Clinton with her most significant opportunity to address her trustworthiness. Her campaign plans to release biographical videos showing how she has delivered on promises to help children and families throughout her career. And the party will lean on President Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Elizabeth Warren, among others, to vouch for her.

Conventions can indeed work wonders: In the 1992 campaign, when Bill Clinton contended with accusations of adultery and draft-dodging, his aides produced the “Man from Hope” video, which reintroduced him as a working-class kid who made good.

But aides to Mrs. Clinton also take solace from polls showing that voters believe she is more prepared than Mr. Trump to be commander in chief and that she is looking out for the middle class. “You can never forget that elections are about choices,” said Joel Benenson, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist.

Demolishing an opponent’s trustworthiness can also be fairly quick work in politics: Mrs. Clinton is assailing Mr. Trump’s credibility and honesty in many areas, from his record in business to his campaign promises.

Still, attacking Mr. Trump, no matter how successfully, will not necessarily fix what is broken in Mrs. Clinton’s relationship with voters.

“Trust is one of the hardest things to regain once it’s lost, whether it’s with co-workers, friends, relatives, spouses, kids,” said Russell J. Schriefer, a Republican strategist who was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney.

“There are two things that drive us in politics: the head and the heart,” he added. “Trust is a question of heart.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us...rust.html?_r=0

James Comey says Hillary Clinton not ‘sophisticated enough’ to understand classified markings




By Stephen Dinan -
The Washington Times - Thursday, July 7, 2016

Hillary Clinton wasn’t “sophisticated enough” to know she was risking national security when she sent and received classified information, so it was impossible to make a criminal case against her, FBI Director James B. Comey told Congress on Thursday.

He said Mrs. Clinton, the former State Department secretary and now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was briefed on the State Department’s policies but broke them, sending or receiving more than 100 messages that contained information that was confidential at the time she handled it. He also confirmed that she misled voters in her public explanations, and he insisted that she would have faced discipline, including potentially losing her right to see secret information, if she were still a government employee.

But he said his investigators couldn’t find any evidence that Mrs. Clinton intended to break the law, which he said means they couldn’t recommend that she be prosecuted.

“Certainly, she should have known not to send classified information,” Mr. Comey told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “I think she was extremely careless. I think she was negligent. That, I could establish. What we can’t establish is that she acted with the necessary criminal intent.”

In five hours of testimony, Mr. Comey painted a picture of Mrs. Clinton as out of her depth when it came to understanding technology and not altogether aware of the classified information swirling around her. But Mr. Comey said her lapses came out of ignorance, not out of an effort to share secret information with the country’s enemies.

“Certainly, she should have known not to send classified information,” Mr. Comey told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “I think she was extremely careless. I think she was negligent. That, I could establish. What we can’t establish is that she acted with the necessary criminal intent.”

In five hours of testimony, Mr. Comey painted a picture of Mrs. Clinton as out of her depth when it came to understanding technology and not altogether aware of the classified information swirling around her. But Mr. Comey said her lapses came out of ignorance, not out of an effort to share secret information with the country’s enemies.

He also said the Justice Department believes the law imposing penalties for mishandling classified information, which does not on its face require criminal intent, may be unconstitutional.

The director said that making an example out of Mrs. Clinton would have been “celebrity hunting,” and that would have been unfair to her. “I know that frustrates people, but that’s the way the law is. That’s the practice in the Department of Justice,” he said.

Republicans said that by not making an example of Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey set a precedent that carelessness — including letting others without clearance see top-secret information — is an excuse, particularly if it involves a high-profile political figure.

“The average American, if they’d done what you laid out, they’d be in handcuffs,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and oversight committee chairman.
Mr. Comey closed his yearlong investigation this week by concluding that Mrs. Clinton may have broken the law and was “extremely careless,” but he said he and all of his top investigators thought she shouldn’t be charged. On Wednesday, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch agreed by announcing she was closing the case against Mrs. Clinton and her top aides.

Late Thursday, the State Department said it was kick-starting its own investigation into the handling of classified information during Mrs. Clinton’s four years as secretary. The department said it postponed its own investigation to give space to the FBI’s criminal probe.

The renewed probe has no deadline but could result in sanctions, including loss of security clearances for Mrs. Clinton and some of her top aides.

Mrs. Clinton used a secret server she kept in the basement of her New York home to conduct official business. She said publicly that she didn’t send or receive classified information, that she complied with department policies and that she returned all of the work-related messages to the government in December 2014.

Mr. Comey refuted each of those explanations.

“We found work-related emails, thousands, that were not returned,” he said.

He said he could find no evidence that Mrs. Clinton lied to his investigators but didn’t look into whether she lied to Congress. Mr. Chaffetz said he would quickly issue a criminal referral asking Mr. Comey to pursue that line of questioning.

Under questioning, Mr. Comey declined to say whether he was investigating activities of the Clinton Foundation, suggesting more political jeopardy for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

The FBI director did dismiss some of the more pointed Republican speculation about Mrs. Clinton’s behavior, including that the hacker “Guccifer” gained access to her system. Mr. Comey said the FBI interviewed Guccifer and he admitted he had lied.

Mr. Comey also said there is no concrete evidence that enemy countries gained access to her system, though there is evidence that foreign governments tried. He said it’s impossible to know whether they did gain access, given the nature of Mrs. Clinton’s system.

Mr. Comey vehemently disputed conservatives’ speculation that his investigation was tarnished. He said he faced no political interference from the White House, the Clinton campaign or anyone else, and that the timing of his announcement was entirely his choice.

Although Mrs. Clinton sent and received dozens of messages that contained classified information, much of the hearing focused on three messages that contained markings — a “(C)” next to some paragraphs — which under State Department practice meant the information that followed was to be treated as classified.

Before he began the investigation, Mr. Comey said, he assumed everyone with access to high levels of classified information would have known the importance of the (C) marking. But he said after talking with Mrs. Clinton, he was no longer sure “whether she was actually sophisticated enough to understand what a C in parentheses means.”

“It’s possible — possible — that she didn’t understand what a C meant when she saw it in the body of an email like that,” he said.

Democrats said the (C) was a “tiny, little” marking that Mrs. Clinton could easily have missed — something Mr. Comey said was indeed possible. The State Department said those messages probably shouldn’t have been marked classified anyway.

“Those markings were a human error. They didn’t need to be there,” department spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday.

Documents with secret information are supposed to be marked with a header saying they are classified, and none of the three emails with the (C) markings had that header information, Mr. Comey said. That meant they were not properly marked according to the rules, he said.

Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, said the hearing did little damage other than to show his boss was technologically incompetent.
“Director Comey’s testimony clearly knocked down a number of false Republican talking points and reconciled apparent contradictions between his previous remarks and Hillary Clinton’s public statements,” he said in a statement.

But Republicans said Mr. Comey left plenty of room for questions about Mrs. Clinton’s behavior and about his own conclusion that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute.

“Before I came to Congress, I spent several years as a criminal court judge. I presided over several hundred felony criminal cases. And I can assure you that I saw many cases where the evidence of criminal intent was flimsier than the evidence in this case,” said Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., Tennessee Republican.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ticated-enoug/