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Maybe. It depends where the story goes from here.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans are making a lot of hay about the latest developments – as though it proves they were right all along that Hillary is evil and liberals owe them some kind of apology for defending her.
Well, ha ha, no. For a start, you don't get to say “See I said all along she was guilty of something!” when you’ve said that about every single thing she’s been accused of since she was First Lady (and still maintain that the subsequent lack of evidence is the result of liberal media bias and proof of just how evil and conniving she is). These are the same people who hated her husband so much and was convinced he was guilty of SOMETHING they spent most of his two terms investigating him until they found something they could impeach him for.
Also, we don’t know that Hillary has actually done anything illegal. Yet. Some reports suggest there was indeed classified material in some of the emails, but we don’t yet know who put them there (Hillary or one of her staff) or whether they were stripped of ID markers highlighting them as Top Secret, etc. There’s a lot we don’t know. But it does seem to be more serious than Hillary let on back in March.
The Daily Beast has a fairly good summary of the scope of the problem, and Chris Cillizia at WaPo’s The Fix has a few sensible questions here regarding where this may go and how bad it could get.
Meanwhile, there is much dithering around the possibility that the Email Thing will cost Hillary the Demo nomination – so much so that there’s a rumor on the Twitters that Al Gore is going to enter the race as an establishment back-up in case Hillary ends up in jail (which is also being taken as “proof” that the FBI has found enough evidence to indict her).
Apart from the fact that Gore has denied the rumor, I don't think EmailGate is going to hurt Hillary’s chances that much (short of a criminal indictment, of course). If anything is hurting her, it’s that she’s handled the situation in as careful and cagey a manner as possible as to make it look as though she’s only being as forthcoming about it as the FBI forces her to be, all the while insisting there is no “there” there.
Which is maybe not the kind of thing you want to be doing when yr running for POTUS. Especially when all of a sudden yr race isn’t as uncontested as you originally thought.
On the other hand, it’s not like all the Demos are going to give their vote to Jeb Bush (let alone Trump) as a result of either EmailGate or her attitude about it. They could conceivably give it to Bernie Sanders instead, but given that on average she’s still beating Sanders by a 35-point spread in the polls, I think she still has room to get past this.
And as has been pointed out elsewhere, at the end of the day, the main question that’s going to matter to the Demo establishment isn’t “Are Bernie’s ideas better than Hillary’s?” but “Who’s more likely to beat the Koch-funded GOP guy?” That may not fit into yr political ideology, but it is generally how elections work, like it or not. And the closer we get to Midnight, the more the electability question becomes important.
So yeah, at this stage it's probably going to take an indictment to take Hillary out of that equation.
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This is dF
Unsurprisingly, Republicans are making a lot of hay about the latest developments – as though it proves they were right all along that Hillary is evil and liberals owe them some kind of apology for defending her.
Well, ha ha, no. For a start, you don't get to say “See I said all along she was guilty of something!” when you’ve said that about every single thing she’s been accused of since she was First Lady (and still maintain that the subsequent lack of evidence is the result of liberal media bias and proof of just how evil and conniving she is). These are the same people who hated her husband so much and was convinced he was guilty of SOMETHING they spent most of his two terms investigating him until they found something they could impeach him for.
Also, we don’t know that Hillary has actually done anything illegal. Yet. Some reports suggest there was indeed classified material in some of the emails, but we don’t yet know who put them there (Hillary or one of her staff) or whether they were stripped of ID markers highlighting them as Top Secret, etc. There’s a lot we don’t know. But it does seem to be more serious than Hillary let on back in March.
The Daily Beast has a fairly good summary of the scope of the problem, and Chris Cillizia at WaPo’s The Fix has a few sensible questions here regarding where this may go and how bad it could get.
Meanwhile, there is much dithering around the possibility that the Email Thing will cost Hillary the Demo nomination – so much so that there’s a rumor on the Twitters that Al Gore is going to enter the race as an establishment back-up in case Hillary ends up in jail (which is also being taken as “proof” that the FBI has found enough evidence to indict her).
Apart from the fact that Gore has denied the rumor, I don't think EmailGate is going to hurt Hillary’s chances that much (short of a criminal indictment, of course). If anything is hurting her, it’s that she’s handled the situation in as careful and cagey a manner as possible as to make it look as though she’s only being as forthcoming about it as the FBI forces her to be, all the while insisting there is no “there” there.
Which is maybe not the kind of thing you want to be doing when yr running for POTUS. Especially when all of a sudden yr race isn’t as uncontested as you originally thought.
On the other hand, it’s not like all the Demos are going to give their vote to Jeb Bush (let alone Trump) as a result of either EmailGate or her attitude about it. They could conceivably give it to Bernie Sanders instead, but given that on average she’s still beating Sanders by a 35-point spread in the polls, I think she still has room to get past this.
And as has been pointed out elsewhere, at the end of the day, the main question that’s going to matter to the Demo establishment isn’t “Are Bernie’s ideas better than Hillary’s?” but “Who’s more likely to beat the Koch-funded GOP guy?” That may not fit into yr political ideology, but it is generally how elections work, like it or not. And the closer we get to Midnight, the more the electability question becomes important.
So yeah, at this stage it's probably going to take an indictment to take Hillary out of that equation.
Developing …
Reply all,
This is dF
