How Hillary Can Defeat Hillary
If Hillary Clinton didn't do anything wrong, why is she so reluctant to talk about it?
It is hard to call her barely legal use of her personal account to conduct government business a "scandal," since she so resolutely refuses to sound scandalized by it.
Yet even supporters of her expected presidential bid must ask themselves: How would they feel if Dick Cheney, as vice president, mixed his government and personal emails in a personal account on a personal at-home internet server?
How would they feel if he told us that he deleted 30,000 of those emails and responded "trust me" to question about whether none had to do with the public's business?
Worse, if Clinton has nothing to hide or even feel embarrassed about, why did she avoid facing reporters about the bubbling "Emailgate" or "Servergate," as some called it, for more than a week?
Why did she not come forward until two days after Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and leader on national security issues, admonished her on "Meet the Press" to "step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is ... I think, at this point, from this point on, the silence is going to hurt her."
One would think so. Yet her remarkably glib and casual responses to questions about her email destruction ("I didn't see any reason to keep them.") and her justification for mingling public and private emails ("convenience") recall some of her ugliest past episodes -- just as she appears poised by all indications to throw her bonnet into the ring as a presidential candidate.
There were the billing records from her law firm about the Whitewater land deal that could not be found during that investigation, yet miraculously turned up in the White House two years after they were subpoenaed.
There was her reluctance to release even the names of her consultants during her failed effort to enact health care reform.
Servergate itself resulted from disclosures uncovered by the Republican-backed House investigation of the attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya. Thanks to Clinton's suspicious behavior, the overblown Benghazi investigation has taken on a glimmer of new life, even if only in Republican eyes.
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