5 takeaways

5 takeaways from Clinton's email reprieve

While the campaign dodges a bullet – dashing GOP hopes – the scandal will live on.

By Glenn Thrush

The Republicans, they had a dream.

And in that dream, Hillary Clinton, the only presidential candidate at the major-party level with a functional campaign and (relatively) united party behind her, is led out of Whitehaven in handcuffs to face a campaign-killing indictment for setting up an illegal email server.

For the past 16 months, since The New York Times “homebrew” server story broke, GOP operatives, voters and talk-radio and media types have banked on an FBI deus ex machina to once and for all crush the Wicked Witch of the Left. Then, on Tuesday, Bureau Director James Comey, a career prosecutor who reeks of rectitude and contempt for Clinton’s behavior, walked to a lectern to declare Madam Secretary’s actions had been “extremely careless” but not criminal.

This is good news for Clinton and bad news for Republicans, period. A few months ago, Tim Miller, a Trump-hating former communications director for Jeb Bush, told me, memorably, that Clinton would beat the presumptive GOP nominee “from jail.”

Clinton’s people were always confident this day would come, but they didn’t want to test Miller’s proposition: One maudlin low-level staffer lamented, earlier in the spring, that “the race is ours, so long as she doesn’t get indicted.” I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, and neither could he.

Congrats, Brooklyn. The boss won’t have to put her wallet, keys and belt in the big steel box. But hold the handstands. The email scandal (yes, we still get to call it that) has already done serious damage to a candidate who didn’t enjoy a sterling reputation to start with, created weeks of needless distraction and spotlighted her management weaknesses at a time when she is supposed to be selling the American electorate on her steadiness, competence and smarts in comparison to big, bad you-know-who.

Here are five consequences of Comey’s decision:

1) Americans still don’t trust Clinton. Imagine an alternate universe in which the email story wasn’t hanging over Clinton’s head for an entire campaign — a world in which the candidate hadn’t provided the hammers used to demolish her old sky-high State Department approval ratings. That universe, like the Hillary-in-the-pokey fantasy, doesn’t exist. Even as Clinton leads in state and national head-to-head polls against Trump, she ties or trails him on the core question of trustworthiness, with about two-thirds of voters saying they don’t trust her.

Trust isn’t everything, and neither is likeability (candidates have won with relatively low ratings in the past), and she’s lucky to face in Trump a candidate whose public utterances have been deemed, by the nonpartisan PolitiFact, to be mostly false or flat-out lies (Clinton’s reviewed statements have been judged to be 73 percent true by comparison). But the toxic combination of Clinton’s untrustworthiness, a sense that the Clintons play by their own set of rules and her own unwillingness — for months — to fess up to making a mistake with the server, tamp down enthusiasm for her candidacy and have put a ceiling on her poll numbers.

Clinton’s pivot to the general election, understandably, began with a blunderbuss against Trump. But the email scandal (and lingering questions about her family’s charitable foundation) means that she’ll also need to erode her negatives, a tougher task for a candidate with universal name recognition. “From her point of view, establishing positives is far more important to winning,” Mark Penn, Clinton’s hard-edged 2008 strategist, recently told my colleague Annie Karni. “Why spend so much energy attacking Trump, what difference does it make, when he’s over 57 percent negative and she has a lot of leadership qualities that have gone unsung?”

Why? Because it’s easier, cheaper and more fun to tear Trump apart than to reassemble the humpty-dumpty of the candidate’s trustworthiness.

2) Paranoia may destroy her. The email scheme (conceived by a half-dozen longtime aides and lawyers in secret) came as no surprise to everybody else not admitted to the innermost inner sanctum of Hillary land. Clinton (who famously demanded a “zone of privacy” around her family during the 1992 elections) jealously guards her right to set up any system she views as necessary to retain her privacy — even when those actions conflict with a public servant’s need to heed disclosure rules.

All this is rooted in an extreme sense of defensiveness, people close to Clinton have told me over the years, born out of endless investigations into the family’s private dealings; but if controversies — Whitewater, cattle futures, the Lewinsky affair and now the emails — haven’t resulted in criminal prosecutions, they have revealed a persecution complex, a sense of self-pity that often acted counter to the family’s larger political and policy objectives.

3) The system is rigged! Outsider rage is the fuel that rocketed Trump and Bernie Sanders through the primaries — and the FBI decision (fairly or not) immediately sparked charges that the fix was in. The mind-bogglingly dopey decision by Attorney General Loretta Lynch to chit-chat with Bill Clinton a few days before Comey’s announcement looked really, really bad; It looked even crummier after the Times reported that Hillary Clinton was, oh, you know, musing about possibly keeping Lynch on if she was elected.

There is, so far, zero evidence that any of these dots connect to form a vast left-wing conspiracy to spring a felon from her criminal just deserts. But Clinton seems to have gotten away with playing by her own rules, and American despise a dynastic double-standard as much, maybe more, than they hate a little honest political graft. By Tuesday lunchtime Twitter was groaning under the weight of conspiracy theories and there will be — I’ll bet $5 on it — calls in the GOP-run House to investigate how all of this went down.

For Trump, a presumptive nominee struggling to line up support (and staff) from inside his own nose-holding party establishment, the no-prosecution decision is a mixed goodie bag. On one hand, a Clinton indictment would have been huge — but he knows a good pitchfork issue when he sees one, and is intent on using it to motivate his base after weeks of playing defense.

His first Tweet of the day, an outsider’s call to arms: “The system is rigged. General Petraeus got in trouble for far less. Very very unfair! As usual, bad judgment.”

His second: “FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem”

4) Trump vs. Comey? The Republican “establishment” (which I will define as anybody not named Trump) reacted tentatively and with respectful disdain toward the FBI director’s decision to recommend against an indictment. “While I respect the law enforcement professionals at the FBI, this announcement defies explanation. No one should be above the law,” Speaker Paul Ryan wrote in a statement released a couple of hours after Comey’s news conference. “But based upon the director’s own statement, it appears damage is being done to the rule of law. Declining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible precedent.”

A raft of other Republicans responded in similar fashion — toeing a political tightrope as they criticized Comey’s decision without taking too harsh a line against a director renowned for his tough-guy probity and front-line investigators who are nearly universally respected by voters. Trump skated just up to the line in his tweets — and his campaign hadn’t released an official statement by midafternoon.

But it’s hard to see a candidate who prides himself on flouting political correctness — and calling out a “rigged game” — not piling onto Comey. And that could backfire big-time against a 6-foot-8-inch career law enforcement official who stared down George W. Bush and his top staff by refusing to sign a re-upping of the National Security Agency’s domestic wire-tapping program.

5) Stop using email. Put the politics and the legal issues aside: Comey’s statement essentially represented a public capitulation in the fight to safeguard government (or quasi-government setups like Clinton’s) for official business. The Russians and the Chinese, according to recent reporting, have launched potentially successful invasions of the State Department system — which is one of the reasons Clinton tried to concoct her own.

Apart from flouting the rules, Clinton’s attempt to circumvent the system simply didn’t work, the FBI found.

“Secretary Clinton’s … personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent,” Comey said. She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.”