This Hillary Clinton Email Should Sabotage Her Campaign
The Hillary Clinton email scandal has done little to sink her presidential aspirations thus far in the election cycle in spite of Republican (and some Independent) hopes that it would.
Clinton allegedly used a private email server to conduct State business while Secretary under the first term of the Obama administration. She also allegedly directed staff to destroy tens of thousands of emails that were sent and received during that time, telling the public the emails were strictly personal.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is currently conducting an investigation into whether illegal activity occurred. A separate audit conducted by the State Department Inspector General in May found that she violated federal rules with her use of the private server.
Since then, she has put away Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and appears en route to secure the nomination. She is also performing better than she ever has in head-to-head polling against Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
JUST IN: State Department refuses to comment on scrubbed Hillary Clinton calendars https://t.co/V2y1fqCLXL pic.twitter.com/qmF6vB3Gfh
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) June 24, 2016
Nothing short of an indictment by the FBI will stop her, it seems; yet, most Americans believe the Hillary Clinton email scandal is shady politics, with 60 percent of the voting public believing that she has lied about her innocence, CBS News reports.
Then, this happened.
The Associated Press reported on Thursday, June 22, that Clinton failed to hand over a key email in which she discussed problems with using her private server with Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin.
“At the time, emails sent from Clinton’s BlackBerry device and routed through her private clintonemail.com server in the basement of her New York home were being blocked by the State Department’s spam filter,” AP reporter Michael Biesecker explains. “A suggested remedy was for Clinton to obtain a state.gov email account.”
The Hillary Clinton email exchange then found the Democratic front-runner expressing concern over risking personal emails in the process. Clinton would never get that state.gov account.
Her campaign has already lined up an explanation for the public, with campaign spokesman Brian Fallon explaining that some Hillary Clinton email disclosures did not include things that were included in Abedin’s files and vice-versa.
However, it points to a bigger problem with the investigation, and with the aforementioned perception that Clinton is not a trustworthy candidate.
For starters, Clinton reportedly complied when she handed over 55,000 pages of work-related emails to the State Department, but the fact this exchange was not included naturally calls into question the credibility of those disclosures. What else is she hiding, in other words?
And, even if there is nothing too groundbreaking in the other work-related docs that Clinton failed to hand over, how are voters supposed to know that? Ultimately, it comes down to how much they’re willing to trust a person, who has been contradicted multiple times since the scandal first broke.
If 60 percent felt she was lying before, how many more think that now?
Hillary Clinton kept at least one important email from the State Department https://t.co/wYRdPd1Ov0 pic.twitter.com/xvfhxCJ0d9
— VICE News (@vicenews) June 24, 2016
That’s why a candidate as seemingly unhinged as Trump continues to hang in there against Clinton’s career politician polish.
Trump’s wild personality, brash outspokenness, and penchant for making statements that are sometimes seen as racist or bigoted continue to hold their own against Clinton, who is currently winning in most polls, but not by much, according to the latest from Real Clear Politics, and with far too great of a margin of error to have much value at this point.
The latest numbers show that Clinton leads by around 5 percentage points, 45.3 to 39.4. That only adds up to 84.7, leaving around 15.3 percentage points on the table (i.e. your Independents and undecideds).
But, what do you think, reader? Is the newly discovered Hillary Clinton email going to sink her poll numbers ahead of the general election? Sound off in the comments section below.
[Image via Flickr Creative Commons / World Bank Photo Collection / NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)]
