Hillary Clinton sure is lucky that Bernie Sanders stayed away from the email issue (and otherwise avoided going for the jugular during the primaries), and faces a candidate so awful in the general election that people aren’t paying much attention to her rather major faults. After being chastised by the fact checkers for lying about the email scandal again last weekend, she repeated the same lies. After months of failing to make herself available for a press conference, as Chris Cillizza wrote, Hillary Clinton tried to answer questions about her emails. It didn’t go well. She repeated the same lies which have already been debunked.
This is by now a very familiar pattern with Clinton when it comes to her email server. She simply refuses to acknowledge any misstep or wrongdoing beyond an initial poor decision to exclusively use a private email server for “convenience” sake. She continues to provide legalistic answers that touch the truth but aren’t entirely the truth. As I have written many times before, a campaign is not a court. Public opinion is a different thing than the law. Clinton has never grasped and seems to still not grasp that.
Her ongoing poor handling of the email issue may not matter because she is running against someone in Donald Trump who has proven uniquely unable to keep the spotlight off of him. But it suggests that if Trump could ever get his act together, Clinton still carries considerable vulnerabilities as a candidate.
Despite the lies which Clinton keeps repeating, presumably believing that if she tells them enough people will suddenly think they are true, James Comey’s statement demonstrated several lies on Clinton’s part. In addition, the State Department Inspector General report showed that Clinton knowingly violated the rules in effect regarding email when she was Secretary of State, failed to cooperate with the investigation, and tried to cover-up her actions.
Clinton’s misbehavior of Secretary of State would prevent her from being from being confirmed for any appointed government position, and would prevent her from being hired for any government position which requires security clearance. Being elected president is not subject to these considerations. It is disgraceful that the Democratic Party would make her the nominee with her record. In any normal election year this would also prevent her from being elected, but with Donald Trump her opponent this is no normal election year.
