Hillary Clinton Can’t Write Off Scandal As Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy When The FBI Is Investigating
Hillary Clinton’s playbook to label attacks on her as a “vast right-wing conspiracy” falls short with her email scandal because it is the FBI, not congressional Republicans, that has launched a criminal investigation into her server, the Washington Post‘s Karen Tumulty said Tuesday.
“It’s one thing to say that she has enemies out there. She does; she always has,” Tumulty said. “But it’s difficult for them to say that’s the only story going on here when just last week the FBI demanded–she turned over her server, her private email server, in response to a demand by the FBI.”
Tumulty said Democrats are disappointed they have gotten more of the same from this cycle’s Clinton campaign. Instead of the “brand new kind of Hillary Clinton” campaign they were promised, Clinton has been more inaccessible, cautious, and inauthentic, Tumulty said.
Clinton has suffered from a slow drip of new information regarding her private server for more than five months. With the State Department ordered to release a batch of her emails every month once they are reviewed, the story is likely to last the duration of the campaign season.
“If you talk to Democrats privately, they say, ‘This is not going away and we are quite worried,’” Luke Russert said.
Clinton infamously used the “vast right-wing conspiracy” line in 1998 to defend Bill Clinton from accusations of his affair with Monica Lewinski.
“You can’t sort of write it off once you have the FBI and the Department of Justice involved in this investigation,” Tumult said.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), who heads the committee on Benghazi that discovered Clinton’s private server, scoffed at Clinton’s claim she is victim to unfair attacks. Gowdy said Clinton was ducking responsibility for actions she took on her own.
“I didn’t advise her to have her own server. I didn’t advise her to rely on Sidney Blumenthal as her primary adviser on Libya. I didn’t advise her to keep her public records for 20 months after she separated from service and not turn them over to the Department of State,” Gowdy said in a heated moment with CNN’s Brianna Keilar last week.
