Run-out-the-clock

Hillary Clinton’s run-out-the-clock strategy

The Democrat aims to ignore the email and Foundation controversies, seeing a shrinking calendar as her friend.

By Annie Karni

She is not planning on sitting for another televised armchair confessional to rehash regrets about a private email server. Nor is the campaign setting up the kind of war room employed last year to discredit a book that aimed to expose a quid-pro-quo relationship between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department officials.

With 75 days until Election Day and new emails once again casting a pall over her campaign, Hillary Clinton aims to “run out the clock,” confidants say, on the latest chapters of the overlapping controversies that have dogged her campaign since the start.

According to allies and operatives close to the campaign, Clinton’s team thinks “they can ride out” any negative reaction to a set of new emails that show Clinton Foundation officials trying to set up State Department meetings for donors during her tenure as the nation's top diplomat.

“That doesn’t mean no response,” one Clinton team insider said, “but a muted one rather than a five-alarm fire.”

It's a strategy borne, in part, of a belief held deeply by Hillary Clinton herself the email controversy is a fake scandal and that voters are as sick of it as the candidate herself — and by the profound weaknesses of Clinton's opponent.

In the campaign’s view, the emails that surfaced this week do not advance the Foundation storyline; while emails obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch shed light on the open line of communication between Clinton’s top aides and Foundation officials, there is no proof positive that donors received special access or treatment from the government.

Plus, the campaign thinks Clinton’s commanding lead over Donald Trump in both national and battleground state polls gives her freedom to not comment – indeed, largely ignore – the disclosure this week that the FBI found nearly 15,000 new emails Clinton did not voluntarily hand over to the State Department last year.

While those emails could be released to the public as early as October, Clinton allies predicted that the State department’s tedious review process means the release is more likely to affect a Clinton reelection campaign in 2020 than derail her this fall.

“It’s going to be there forever,” said Clinton ally James Carville of the email controversy, holding that there was nothing new for the candidate or her campaign to add to the discussion. “They should go about their business,” he advised.

Clinton’s more pressing concern, her donors said, is raising money for the expensive ground organization she will need to deliver a win. On Tuesday, she ignored the new chapters of her old controversies while attending a star-studded fundraiser at Justin Timberlake’s mansion in Los Angeles, followed by a pair of big money events in Laguna Beach.

Some Democrats, including close Clinton allies, have started to warn that their nominee might be under-estimating the danger lurking in the fall as Trump and Republicans prepare to launch negative ads on these twin controversies and remind American voters just how little they trust the former secretary of state. Their best hope is that Trump continues to veer wildly off script.

Clinton remains, as one ally described, as decidedly and defiantly “puritan” as she was 17 months ago that the email investigation is nothing more than a partisan attack. Close allies characterize her as frustrated by the ongoing focus on the issue of her email server because she still fundamentally believes she did nothing to bend the rules. She is also resentful that Trump is only trailing by single-digits in national polls when she thinks there is no comparison between her baggage and his and that a Clintonian double standard is at play.

“They’re in a box,” lamented one Clinton ally. “It’s an issue that won’t go away, no matter what they say. Nobody’s happy about it.”

Because of Clinton's core belief that she did nothing wrong, allies no longer believe the Democratic nominee is her own best spokeswoman on the email issue. In July, Clinton was still tripping over questions that the campaign had hoped were finally behind it after FBI Director James Comey said he would not recommend criminal charges. Clinton told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that Comey said her answers to the public “were truthful,” when he made no such statement.

“I may have short-circuited it,” Clinton explained during an appearance in front of black and Hispanic journalists earlier this month, a soundbite Trump has subsequently employed to question her mental capacity to be president.

On Monday, Trump called for a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton's emails -- a charge that evokes the memory of Ken Starr and the investigations of Bill Clinton’s White House that began with Whitewater and ended with Monica Lewinsky.

But Bill Clinton allies on Tuesday were more upset about the decision to downsize the philanthropic organization to a fraction of its current size — and remove the former president from his fundraising role and board position.

“Why did no one care that Bob Dole was majority leader and his wife ran the Red Cross?” said Carville, blaming the extreme downsizing on public pressure and a double standard for anything Clinton-related. “Every columnist can take a great victory lap,” he fumed. “I will lay back and mourn for those who will die because they’re not going to get the vaccines they need. I guess at some point, politically it probably makes sense — but I’m embarrassed to be around my children for saying they should do this.”

But inside Hillary Clinton’s camp, the team is unwilling to engage more forcefully or offensively without evidence that the new emails and new Foundation allegations are hurting her.

Indeed, without new information and barring a dramatic improvement in Trump’s numbers, the Clinton team thinks it would be a mistake for the candidate or her surrogates to respond.

One source close to the campaign said Clinton officials want to see if the Republicans overplay their hand while hammering Clinton on an issue that close to two-thirds of voters, according to a Monmouth University poll, said they were sick of hearing about -- last year.

“There’s a chance that Trump gets better, and that some sort of mythical new information comes out of the emails,” said Mo Elleithee, director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and a veteran of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “But in the absence of that, the Clinton people seem to be content with keeping their heads down, letting her deliver her positive case and allowing Trump to continue to cloud the national conversation with his own unforced errors.”

A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment.