Decision 2016

Running out the clock.

August 31, 2016 By Paul Gleiser

Hillary’s email troubles refuse to go away. This week, the State Department announced that about 30 emails that may be related to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya are among the many thousands of emails recovered by the FBI from Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

These are emails that Mrs. Clinton deleted because, according to her, they dealt with personal matters – her daughter’s wedding, her mother’s funeral, yoga routines and the like.

Mrs. Clinton testified in Congress under oath that she had turned over all of her work-related emails.

The precise content of the 30 or so emails dealing with Benghazi isn’t known and the State Department is going to considerable lengths to keep it that way. That the emails even exist would not be known save for Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

State Department lawyers have told the presiding judge that they will need until the end of September to review the 30 emails and redact any potentially classified information. The judge has questioned why it would take so long to review such a small number of documents and to report to him in a week as to why the process can’t be expedited.

This is just the latest chapter in a volume of revelations connected with Hillary Clinton and her private email server. As recently as last week the Associated Press ran a story connecting email communication between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. Those emails revealed a very strong correlation between major donations to the Clinton Foundation by foreign governments and one-on-one meetings with then Secretary of State Clinton.

No quid pro quo has been established, no connection between a donation to the Clinton Foundation and a favorable action by the State Department.

At least not yet.

With just 68 days until election day, one gets the sense that a major portion of Mrs. Clinton’s strategy is to simply run out the clock. The apparent goal is to do everything possible to delay every potential revelation until after 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time November 8, when polls on the west coast close.

One leg of that strategy is to sharply limit media access to Mrs. Clinton. At this writing, it has been 270 days since she last gave a press conference. There are now several websites with count-up clocks dating from December 4, 2015, the last time Hillary went one-on-one with the press. Days Since Hillary’s Last Press ConferenceCount Up

The “Hiding Hillary” strategy – as critics have dubbed it – depends in large measure on a compliant media. So far, the major media outlets have expressed little outrage over their lack of access to Mrs. Clinton.

This episode serves to remind us that this is an election season like none before it. No candidate has ever before been so deeply immersed in controversy so close to an election. That Mrs. Clinton leads in the polls while carrying so much baggage is simply without precedent.

Truly an election like no other in our history.