http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425745/print Clinton Coronation Back on Track? Not So Fast
By John Fund — October 18, 2015
In the Perils of Pauline–like cliffhanger serial that is Hillary Clinton’s career, she has once again escaped and is declaring herself safe.
A strong debate performance — aided by chief rival Bernie Sanders’s dismissal of her e-mail scandal — has Clinton backers claiming the scandal is a dead issue in the Democratic primaries. Clinton’s pollster, Joel Berenson, notes that some 75 percent of Democrats approve of her, even though 31 percent of them also think she is lying about the e-mail scandal. Her questioners on the House Benghazi Committee, this line of thinking goes, have revealed their partisanship, and she ought to have no trouble besting them in her appearance before the committee this Thursday.
Not so fast. An intelligence source told Fox News the FBI is focusing on evidence that Clinton may have engaged in “gross negligence” in her mishandling of government documents, a violation of the Espionage Act. FBI agents are also looking at obstruction-of-justice allegations. More than 400 e-mails containing classified information flowed through Hillary’s homebrew server, but she continues to insist that she handled no classified material on it. But the mishandling-of-government-documents charge doesn’t even require that any of them be classified.
As for Hillary’s new political peril, Vice President Biden leaked his interest in running for president to columnist Maureen Dowd in early August, knowing that the e-mail revelations would spool out over months. As new revelations are pried out of the State Department, the scandal has taken on new dimension. All appearances to the contrary, its resolution is still beyond Clinton’s control: It lies with the FBI and the national-security establishment, as it always has. Biden might not enter the primaries now, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t fully aware new twists in the story could have party leaders begging him to jump in and replace a badly crippled front-runner at some point in the near future.
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