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Based on some recent comments from President Trump and Lindsey Graham and from watching large quantities of Fox News, I think Republicans are planning on making Hillary Clinton's email server a key issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. (1/many)
Background: Republicans have spent decades demonizing Clinton. In 2015/6 they pretended to care about her email security, journalists pretended to believe them, the FBI investigated and found no crimes, and she lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election. (2/x)
As the 2020 election gears up, you might expect Republicans to be engaged in an all-out effort to define the Democratic presidential candidates. There's been some of that... but Clinton and the FBI investigation into her email server have been coming up again. (3/x)
In an interview on Friday, Trump suggested there should be a new criminal investigation into Clinton and those who investigated her.
Last night, Lindsey Graham gave a speech at Mar-A-Lago calling for a new investigation into Clinton and the dossier (ie, the early stages of the Trump-Russia probe)
Also present: Trey Gowdy, who ran the Benghazi select committee designed to hurt Clinton's political chances which first uncovered her private server.
He works at Fox now.
He works at Fox now.
Graham has previously explicitly framed this sort of investigation as a raw exercise in political power/spite, something he'd do in response to Democratic House investigations of Trump
If you don't watch a lot of Fox News, you might find all this confusing. After all, Clinton isn't running, and the FBI investigation determined she didn't break the law. So what's the deal?
The deal is that since the Mueller probe got going, Trump's Fox allies have tried to protect him by saying that he is the victim of a two-tiered justice system, in which the FBI/DOJ went after him but let Clinton get off even though she supposedly did all the crimes.
Last year I reviewed all 487 segments that Hannity did on the first year of the Mueller probe.
In 218 of them, someone said that Clinton had broken the law.
In 186, someone said that top DOJ/FBI officials had done so.
In 218 of them, someone said that Clinton had broken the law.
In 186, someone said that top DOJ/FBI officials had done so.
This doesn't make sense. No one credible thought Clinton had broken the law, and the very public FBI investigation (and media’s coverage) probably sank Clinton’s campaign, while the very quiet Russia probe during the election helped Trump to victory.
Nonetheless, this line of attack has permeated Fox's programming. And Trump loves it; here's four times he's recently livetweeted a Fox segment about strains of this conspiracy theory:
The worst case scenario here would be a series of politically-motivated criminal investigations into the president’s enemies. That would be a shocking and dangerous authoritarian move. Hannity says that's coming soon; I'm skeptical. mediamatters.org/blog/2019/03/2…
But let's say Lindsey Graham does what he says he'll do and focuses a congressional investigation on Clinton email server and the 2015/16 investigation into it.
Trump won in 2016, at least in part, because a) the FBI investigation damaged Clinton b) the media spent so much time on the email story that it both damaged her and ensured that it was extremely difficult for her to get her message out.
What better way to stymie the efforts by the Democratic presidential candidates to develop a message and reach the public with it than by sucking up media attention with the Clinton email story?
Graham is stepping into Devin Nunes’ role as the chief Republican congressional driver of the story. But he has a big additional advantage: three Democratic presidential candidates are on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs.
That means that if Graham sets up hearings on the Clinton investigation, he can instantly force those candidates to have to talk about it. No matter what they say, that is to Trump's advantage, because they aren’t talking about what they want to talk about.
Then reporters ask all the other candidates if they agree with ehateer those candidates say, etc etc ad infinitum.
They can defend Hillary Clinton or not. Either way, they're not talking about the issues they want to be talking about.
Meanwhile, this creates parallel hearings to any that the House does on Trump’s administration. Soaks up attention from them, and allows Republicans to point to a purportedly parallel case.
Are journalists really going to let this happen again? They must know at this point that Republicans don’t actually care about email security:
It’s a big test for whether journalists learned anything from 2016, or if they’ll play along with this sort of nakedly bad faith effort.
I don’t have a lot of confidence here. #end
I don’t have a lot of confidence here. #end
In the president's first extended public statement on the Barr letter on the Mueller report, he says that "hopefully somebody's going to be looking at the other side," which I read as a reference to Clinton.
The president's personal lawyer says that this is "an era of a real Justice Department where just because you have a D after your name, Democrat, or Clinton or something like that, you can still be held to account."
Mike Huckabee helpfully turns the subtext into text: In response to Dem investigations, "What we need to do as Republicans is let them punch and then counterpunch and open the investigations. Remember, we have the executive branch and the Senate. All they've got is the House."
Now in post form:
Folks. 
Sean Hannity: "My sources are telling me it's all about to come cascading down. This all started when they rigged the investigation into Hillary's email server. ... That horribly flawed investigation into [her] now must be reopened if we are to ever have justice in this country."
Lou Dobbs has reportedly been conferenced into White House meetings.
