By now, Hillary Clinton almost certainly expected that she would be well into a general election fight against Donald Trump – punching down at the target-rich real estate developer amid polls showing her sweeping into the White House.
Not so much.
Instead, Clinton spent the week in California, fighting for votes in advance of the Golden State’s June 7 primary against the still-lingering challenge of Bernie Sanders.
But that was a cakewalk compared with what came out of Washington on Tuesday. The State Department’s inspector general released an 83-page report detailing a series of missteps made by Clinton when she decided to exclusively use a private email server and address for all of her electronic correspondence as the nation’s top diplomat.
Here’s the key snippet, as reported by The Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger:
“The inspector general, in a long-awaited review obtained Wednesday by The Washington Post in advance of its publication, found that Clinton’s use of private email for public business was ‘not an appropriate method’ of preserving documents and that her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed.”
Clinton initially sought to downplay the report as old news. “It’s the same story,” she told Univision anchorwoman Maria Elena Salinas. “Just like previous secretaries of state, I used a personal email. Many people did. It was not at all unprecedented.”
Except that it was. While other secretaries of state had used personal email addresses, none of them had exclusively done so. And as Helderman and Hamburger noted, the State Department IG report scolded Clinton not only for using the email address exclusively but also for slow-walking the release of those emails to the State Department.
For Clinton, who has struggled for more than a year with how to best respond to the email problem – and to the broader honesty and trustworthiness questions it raises – it was exactly what she didn’t need as she seeks to finally close out Sanders and unite the party in the face of a surprisingly strong showing by Trump in early general election polls.
By Thursday night, Clinton was calling in to cable shows to revise and extend her initial dismissiveness about the IG report. Too late. Damage done.
