Clinton’s e-mail problem

The FBI report is really very damning for Clinton. The Washington Post dissects:

Most importantly, Comey said the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails. And it even stands in contrast to her amended statement that she never knowingly sent or received any classified information.

And eight of those e-mails were top secret. This will go to the heart of the trust issue.

Comey said Clinton had used not one but multiple private email servers during her time at State. He said Clinton used multiple email devices during that time. (She had offered her desire to use a single device for “convenience” as the main reason she set up the private server.) He noted that the lawyers tasked by Clinton with sorting her private emails from her professional ones never actually read all of the emails (as the FBI did in the course of its investigation). Comey said that while the FBI found no evidence that Clinton’s private server was hacked by foreign governments, it was possible that it had been. He argued that the Clinton lawyers had deleted emails they marked as personal that contained professional content, and that while the FBI found some of those emails in its investigation, it was certainly possible more existed that they were unable to track down.

This is also very problematic for her. The e-mails deleted were not purely personal, and so it looks like she was covering up.

It’s hard to read Comey’s statement as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She did send and receive classified emails. The setup did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team did delete emails as personal that contained professional information.

Those are facts, facts delivered by the Justice Department of a Democratic administration. And those facts run absolutely counter to the narrative put forth by the Clinton operation: that this whole thing was a Republican witch-hunt pushed by a bored and adversarial media.

Normally this would be fatal for a candidate, but one thing saves her:

The best thing Clinton may have going for her at this point is that Republicans are two weeks away from formally picking Donald Trump as their party’s presidential nominee. Trump has shown a unique ability to hog the national spotlight and make comments that make people wonder whether he is fit to be president. While Clinton’s image numbers are bad, Trump’s are worse.

Almost any of other Republican candidates could have beaten her. But they chose the one who is unelectable.