The mixed FBI judgment on Hillary Clinton’s email practices — that she’d shown extreme carelessness in her handling of classified information but not enough to merit criminal charges — left Democratic Party loyalists in a familiar place: relieved, exasperated and yet hopeful, with fingers crossed, that once again the Clintons had won.
It was another chapter in what is now a 25-year-old saga that has seen Hillary and Bill Clinton survive controversies that usually end political careers. Think Bill Clinton’s denials of an extramarital affair in his 1992 campaign for the presidency or his 1998 impeachment after the Monica Lewinsky dalliance exposed him to obstruction-of-justice claims.
Yet he wound up completing his term in 2001 with a 66 percent Gallup approval rating and his wife had been elected to the Senate.
The email mess that came to the public’s attention a year ago had been a weight around Hillary Clinton that she couldn’t shake, not with attempts at humor or lengthy explanations. Now it’s left to voters to settle whether the finding by FBI Director James Comey that no criminal charges are merited will put an end to the controversy.
In focus groups in Illinois, Pa., and Florida throughout this year, McClatchy found that the emails kept coming up among undecided voters. While most people were not familiar with the emails’ contents, they thought this much: They were stark evidence that Clinton was arrogant and untrustworthy.
Does Comey’s exoneration counter that view, even though the FBI found Clinton and aides “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information?”
To most Democrats, the announcement ends the threat of having a candidate in legal jeopardy.
“No more dealing with the cloud of an FBI investigation into her server hanging over her or the drip drip of bad news,” Doug Thornell, managing director of SKDKnickerbocker, said.
Comey, though, left skeptics with plenty of fodder: Notably, that 110 emails sent or received on Clinton’s private server contained classified material. He said seven of those were classified at one of the highest possible levels, Top Secret/Special Access Program.
“There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation,” Comey said.
That sort of finding is likely to hurt the former secretary of state. “It plays right into the perception that Clinton is not trustworthy,” Tobe Berkovitz, a former media consultant, said.
That’s especially true with a segment of voters that David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, calls the “haters” — the roughly 1 in 5 people who dislike both Clinton and presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Forty-four percent of them were undecided in a recent Paleologos poll.
Paleologos thinks that many of those “haters” were Republicans who were having trouble warming to Trump. As Republicans maintain a drumbeat of criticism of Clinton, Trump might benefit, he said.
The more the emails are discussed, “what you’re going to get is more disgruntled voters,” Berkovitz said.
