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Clinton gets off easy on emails

Source: POLITICO.COM

Watching the Democratic debate Tuesday night, you’d never know Hillary Clinton had the slightest troubles with her emails.

The 2016 Democratic front-runner got off easy on the issue that's dogged her campaign for months. It received less than five minutes of attention. Her Democratic rivals were a big help, especially Sen. Bernie Sanders , who had one of the night's most memorable lines. 

The American people, he said to roaring applause, “are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”



When Clinton deflected questions about her controversial private email setup as secretary of state by changing the topic and blasting what Democrats call a politically motivated House Select Committee Benghazi panel, CNN moderator Anderson Cooper didn't aggressively challenge her and had trouble getting most of the other candidates on the stage to confront Clinton.

“Bernie Sanders just did for Hillary what her own staff could not," one Clinton campaign source said: He shut down the conversation on emails.

While some Clinton aides celebrated the perfunctory discussion as a kind of turning point in the email fiasco, the jubilation could be short-lived.

In just nine days, Clinton is scheduled to appear before the Benghazi committee and face what's expected to be protracted questioning about her decision to rely exclusively on the private email system. And a release of 1,500 more emails in the ramp-up to that testimony could create more turbulence for the Democratic front-runner.

Still, the lead-off debate's cursory treatment of the issue was a stark — and, for Clinton, a very welcome — change from the attention showered on her email practices since the spring. No one brought up, for example, the fact that hundreds of the messages sent over her private email server were later deemed classified, or pushed hard on the fact that the FBI is now investigating how that information wound up on her server.

“I take responsibility,” Clinton said. “I did say it was a mistake. What I did was allowed … but wasn’t the best choice."

Clinton's claim that State's policies allowed individuals to do all their work on a private system is dubious, but she noted that she tried to resolve the controversy by turning over 55,000 pages of emails and asking that they be made public.

Then, she quickly changed the topic to the Benghazi panel and began swinging.

“Let’s take a minute here and point out that this committee is basically an arm of the Republican National Committee,” she said. “It is a partisan vehicle as admitted by the Republican majority leader, Mr. McCarthy, to drive down my poll numbers, big surprise, and that's what they have attempted to do.”

Cooper started to note that the FBI is looking into the matter and that President Barack Obama said in an interview recently that the matter was a "legitimate" issue.

She agreed it was legitimate, but said, “I said I have answered all the questions.”

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