When it comes to Hillary Clinton, Republicans have faith. They don't think they're going to have to rely on some kind of clever messaging in order to undo her presidential candidacy; all that will be necessary is to uncover the truth. This faith springs from the belief, which they hold as firm and true as the Pope holds that Jesus was the son of God, that Clinton, like her husband, is corrupt from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. Which is why they're about to embark on an orgy of congressional investigations and hearings; the emails will be just the beginning. In my Plum Line post today, I explain why I'm skeptical this is going to produce much:
I promise you this: As she contemplated her political future back in 2009 when she became secretary of state, Hillary Clinton spent at least a few moments considering the idea of future congressional hearings on what she did as a federal employee. She's no dummy, and she lived through the 1990s, when congressional Republicans started as many investigations and held as many hearings about her husband's alleged misdeeds as there are stars in the sky.
Clinton may be telling the truth when she says that she decided to use her personal email for State Department business purely because it would be more convenient. But it's almost impossible to believe that she didn't also consider the fact that it would give her more control over her communications, and make them less open to the inevitable FOIA requests and congressional examinations. That isn't because she was intending to plan and execute horrible crimes via email; as she learned again and again in the 1990s, there doesn't have to be any underlying malfeasance for there to be an endless and politically damaging investigation.
You can apply the same two-handed logic to her decision to delete her private emails. On one hand, she's right when she says that anyone, even a public official, deserves to have some privacy; no one has a need to read personal missives between her and her friends and relatives if they had nothing to do with official business. On the other hand, she made the decision to delete those emails precisely because that meant they'd never be read by Republicans in Congress, by reporters, or by the public.
How you judge that decision will probably depend on whether you assume that what's in the emails is benign or nefarious. But unless Republicans want to start sending subpoenas to everyone Hillary Clinton knows on the off chance that they might have gotten an email from her some time in the last six years and that that email might contain evidence of some wrongdoing (which, who knows, they might want to do), then they're probably going to be out of luck. Whatever you think the email story reveals about Hillary Clinton's character, it just won't amount to something that Republicans in Congress can use to bring her down.
In a weird way, this is to the Republicans' credit. While they had plenty of arguments they thought would sting Bill Clinton to the core, they always had faith that what would ultimately lead them to defeat him was substance. Their triumph would come when they finally revealed him for the monster he is. Yes, you might point out that they pursued a whole series of trumped-up fake scandals, but I'd bet that they believed in every one, or nearly so. They thought that once all the facts were known about Whitewater or the travel office or the fundraising excesses or whatever, then all Americans would recoil in disgust and send Bill Clinton packing.
When that didn't happen, they saw it not as their failure to adopt a sufficiently dextrous political strategy, but as a moral failure on the part of the American people themselves. After all, did they not prove that Clinton was a lecher, preying upon White House interns? And yet the public shrugged its shoulders and said, "Whatever-the economy's good."
Despite that experience, the Republicans' faith remains undimmed. They will pursue this email issue because they know in their hearts that if they could just get their hands on all the emails, we'd all be horrified by what they contain. As David Von Drehle writes, "A key page in the Clinton rule book is the one that reads: When in doubt, drive your enemies crazy-then sit back and watch them implode." That's only possible because Republicans have such faith that the truth will set them free, free from the Clintons. When it doesn't, they're driven mad again.
