By The Iowa Statesman
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email problems aren’t going away like I think she had hoped. And soon, we’re likely going to hear about another “vast right-wing conspiracy” meant to knock her out of running for 2016.
If only that were true.
If you don’t think she would go back to that well-worn page of the Clinton Playbook, we hate to break it to you, but it already got a trial run last weekend on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” No. 1 Clinton Mouthpiece James Carville told Andrea Mitchell the controversy was “all about nothing,” a bunch of “right-wing talking points.”
Even Ron Fournier — who knows the Clintons very well — noticed the replay.
Right now, today’s Topic A dominates all five of the Top 5 stories on Real Clear Politics. That’s a not a sunshine-and-happiness kind of moment for a not-yet-campaign that still has to overcome the problems it self-inflicted in 2008. You know situation as the Democratic shoe-in is tenuous, at best, when former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Vice President Al Gore release the trial balloons.
BuzzFeed got ahold of the Facebook analytics (from Facebook — so, we’re sure campaigns are trying to figure out how to get their hands on this bit of usefulness) regarding interactions between The Social Network’s users who talked about Clinton. They weren’t good before the email issue came up, and they’re only getting worse.
Of course, this is yet another scandal that touches on the Obama Presidency. In fact, it’s a scandal that touches the very heart of one of the worst — if not the worst — scandals of his more than six years in office. With a private email server, which wasn’t being archived as required by law, Clinton can delete anything she doesn’t want the rest of the world to know about.
First, President Obama said he only learned of the Clinton email situation from the press (as he does every scandal). That might have been believable if he were a dinosaur like Sen. Lindsey Graham, but we’re talking about a guy who had to have his smartphone ripped from his hands when he became POTUS. So, even the Washington Press Corps wasn’t going to buy it.
Now, they’re rolling out the idea that Obama knew the address, but didn’t know the “details” of the account. This walked back version won’t play any better, because it implies the president, upon seeing an email address that didn’t end in “.gov” (an issue he dogged his predecessor’s administration over), didn’t take the time to ask someone why, which means one of two things must be true:
• he couldn’t be bothered with it (tee time’s in 15), or
• he wished Lois Lerner had done the same thing.
The bottom line is this: Clinton’s email scandal isn’t going away, and it will be difficult, at best, to explain it away. She very clearly broke the law. And in doing so, she afforded herself the opportunity to erase any evidence of what may have been her biggest crime.
Now, the biggest question is whether or not she will have to pay for her crime.
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