It is not a happy Friday for the Clinton campaign as the latest scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton’s private server again dominated the morning news.
Last night, the New York Times broke the news that two inspectors general are calling on the Justice Department to investigate Clinton’s use of a private email account during her entire tenure as Secretary of State.
NBC’s Chuck Todd said about the New York Time’s story:
CHUCK TODD: I think that it is incredibly significant and I have to say watching the little back and forth between the times and the Clinton campaign about how to word it at the end of the day if there is an investigation into the mishandling of classified government documents on Hillary Clinton’s email server. How is Hillary Clinton the subject, how you do the investigation without investigating her but I understand semantics and lawyerly explanations but I think that it is incredibly significant and I’ll tell you it puts incredible pressure on this justice department. You have two inspector generals recommending this investigation and you know if they don’t do it there are going to be a lot of calls about politics saying that a Democratic justice department didn’t do it. So I expect that you will see an investigation open up. You know Joe 15 months before a general election if she is the Democratic nominee and if you begin your general election campaign with potentially a criminal justice investigation you don’t know what is going to happen out of that.
Joe Scarborough said that the two big stories of the week were Clinton’s horrific poll numbers in key swing states and the potential DOJ investigation into Clinton’s emails.
While the Clinton campaign has pushed back hard against the damning report, the New York Times Michael Schmidt is standing by his reporting:
MICHAEL SCHMIDT: We made a minor change to the story shortly after it went online, that said the investigation was in connection with her email use, that that’s where the investigation sort of generated and started from. It didn’t really deviate our story much from where we were before and it was in response to some complaints that we’d received from the Clinton camp that we thought were reasonable and we made them. It doesn’t really change much of what’s going on here. These inspector generals have dogged the Justice Department and said that classified information was mishandled here. They found it in the courts looking into her account and they said to the Justice Department, Was there a crime committed here? Look into this.
ABC’s Good Morning America coverage of the story:
NBC’s Today Show coverage of the story:
CBS This Morning coverage of the story: