A top aide for Hillary Clinton admits it was “foolish” to not address the email scandal more forcefully during the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, said her boss had a gut feeling she should be defending herself against the email allegations, but instead focused on policy issues.
“It was a mistake, although at the time it was hard to accept that telling Hillary to keep bringing up the emails herself could possibly be the right advice,” Palmieri wrote in her upcoming memoir, “Dear Madam President.”
The memoir is written as an open letter to the woman who will one day fulfill Clinton’s dream of becoming the first female president and addresses issues they faced on the campaign trail, according to the Washington Post.
Palmieri argued that the email scandal was an example of the double standard women seeking power face and the criticisms were “overblown.”
During the final weeks of the campaign, the FBI reopened an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. As a result, her 2016 rival, then-candidate Donald Trump, leveraged the controversy as a way to gin up support. The case was again closed days before the election, after the FBI reached the same conclusion it had during the summer – that Clinton had committed no prosecutable offenses.
“I think it was the unease people felt about Hillary’s motivation as a woman seeking power that made it impossible for use to very fully put this matter to bed,” the top aide explained. “I have weathered a lot of political crises, but never encountered one quite like this. It was a box we could never get out of.”
She said she came to the conclusion that no matter what Clinton said about her emails, “there was no right answer” and it wouldn’t be enough.
“Madam President, I believe this to my very core: If it weren’t her emails, it would have been something else,” Palmieri wrote.
Earlier this week, the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the Justice Department for documents from the investigation into Clinton’s email use.
