You may have seen yesterday that a judge ruled that Hillary Clinton’s emails — not the ones she deleted, but the 55,000 she turned over in paper and ink format to the State Department — must be released in monthly batches to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request by Vice.
The State Department must clear these emails first, for understandable reasons of national security — although note that this would have been largely done already, had Clinton followed the law and used a government account for government business.
The department had at first hoped to release the emails all at once, just a few days before the Iowa caucuses are expected to take place in January 2016. Instead, federal district Judge Rudolph Contreras has ordered the department to release whatever it has ready every month between now and then, beginning in late June. That means there will be as many as seven separate info dumps coming up about Clinton. Not exactly ideal if you’re trying to run a presidential campaign.
One can now perhaps better appreciate the wisdom Jeb Bush showed in releasing all of his emails at once. There wasn’t much harmful to him in there, but what there was came out right away and is now nearly forgotten. Thanks to the John Doe investigations into his political universe, Scott Walker has had most of his office’s correspondence released by the courts over time — not all at once, but earlier on in the campaign season, and not in seven discrete drops.
Clinton’s approval numbers were impressive when she became secretary of state — she reached 69 percent favorability in an AP poll at one point, which is very strong for someone who is universally known, as she is. Her numbers have not been holding up very well lately, now that she’s a political candidate again, and this only adds seven additional occasions for further erosion. The Huffington Post poll tracker average now has her in negative territory, with polls from CBS, Fox News, YouGov and Battleground all showing net unfavorable results. If negative stories have gotten her this far, just imagine when they start being recirculated through negative ads to the lower-information voter.
It’s only May 2015. Clinton is still hiding from the press, and in addition to anything else that crops up, we are guaranteed seven email dumps to go before the first primary. Also, if her people are aware of anything that’s going to come up in the email corpus, they will have to sweat it out at the end of each month. What could be discovered? Here are a few possibilities:
1) An occasion upon which she mixed Clinton Foundation and State Department work.
2) Further correspondence about Sidney Blumenthal.
3) A clear omission in what she handed over to the State Department from the private email server she was using — an email known to exist that she must have chosen to withhold.
4) Something completely unexpected at this point.
Even if none of this crops up at all, we will at least get a monthly reminder of how Clinton put herself above the rules that other government employees at State had to live by. There’s nothing positive for her that can come out of any of this.
