After a month of, what Trump would call, “hiding”, Clinton and her surrogates are hitting the trail this Labor Day in full force. The suspicion around Clinton, on the other hand, reflects the fact that Americans increasingly view previously-respected authorities as not what they seem to be. Clinton Foundation money has not yet, and would not in the future, make it into the Clinton’s wallets.
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That’s a helpful, if somewhat macabre, shorthand for thinking about Bill Clinton’s role on his wife’s campaign for president. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver noted the cycle of candidates leading in the polls facing more negative stories, which then narrows the gap with their opponent and switches the media glare to them.
But now he’s getting antsy that Clinton will suffer the same fate he insists holier-than-thou 2000 candidate Al Gore did-lots of jokes at his expense, some fair, some not-and that Trump, like George W. Bush, will be graded on a curve by reporters eager for a tight election.
And there is, surprisingly, bipartisan agreement on this: Some 55% of Democrats agree that the Clintons used public office to dispense favors to their foundation’s friends. NBC News was also a player in the enrich-the-Clintons sweepstakes, hiring their daughter, Chelsea Clinton, for $600,000 per year to be what we could call an “honorary journalist” on prime-time TV.
The FBI focused on whether Clinton sent or received classified information using the private server, which was not authorized for such messages. All of these are crimes. Releases of emails from the State Department have shown the frequent communication between the foundation and Foggy Bottom, and raised serious questions about whether there were quid-pro-quos for foundation donors. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I’d venture sometime in the early part of 2010, when the loosely-organized Tea Party threatened-and succeeded-in upending Congress for Barack Obama.
“And we recently found out that his Trump Foundation has been fined for illegal activity when it made a political contribution to the attorney general of Florida when she was being asked by her constituents to investigate Trump University because of the effects that these people she’s responsible for had experienced”, she continued.
As The New York Times pointed out, Clinton has had a seemingly – as it puts it – “scant” summer schedule. The sentiment that something wrong has taken place is overwhelming.
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Our polling shows Americans would definitely support such a move, either before or after the election. And 88% of Republicans and 68% of Independents want a special prosecutor to look into the possible misconduct.
