PHILADELPHIA — Donald Trump’s effort to throw Hillary Clinton off balance by saying Russia might be in possession of thousands of her deleted emails had an unexpected effect this week, after Clinton’s team used it as an opening to lob their own national security arguments against Trump.
It was a bold move for Clinton, as the scandal surrounding her use of a personal email system when she led the State Department has caused her several headaches, and has led to polls showing voters’ trust in her has eroded. Still, her team gambled that they could use Trump’s argument to try turning the tables on the issue.
“It’s smart, aggressive baseball,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic operative in Washington. “Her email issue isn’t going away anytime soon, no matter what, so they might as well go after Trump with all they have.”
Trump opened the door when he said he hoped Russia might have thousands of Clinton’s emails, and that he hoped Russia would return them to the U.S. so voters can see what she was trying to hide. Instead of ignoring the barb, Clinton’s team fired back that Trump was essentially inviting Russia to hack into U.S. computers, something that could be seen as an attempt to influence the outcome of an election.
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta upped the ante on Wednesday when he said Trump should have to provide special assurances that he won’t leak the classified intelligence that he and Clinton will soon have access to as the nominees of their parties.
“After the comments [Trump] made today, I don’t know how the [Director of National Intelligence] assures himself that information that is being passed on to him is going to be secure,” Podesta said in an interview with Huffington Post. “If nothing else, he has a tendency to be so erratic in the things that he says, I think it’s an issue that Jim Clapper’s going to have to come to grips with.”
Democratic strategists like the strategy, in part because they recognize Clinton’s vulnerabilities on the issue. They view her campaign’s new approach as a way to muddy the water and manage risk.
It’s an attempt to flip the script that Republicans have had success with against Clinton for months. In July, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., sent a letter to Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, urging that Clinton be blocked from the classified briefings afforded to her as the Democratic nominee.
Ryan was responding to what Comey said the FBI discovered in its investigation into Clinton’s use of an unsecured, private email server to conduct State Department business, including while traveling abroad.
The attacks are an attempt to go on the offensive after Democrats were embarrassed by the leak of Democratic National Committee emails and documents last week. Those documents showed the party quietly working to boost Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary, and led Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida to resign from her post as chair of the group.
The Clinton campaign, citing Trump’s often-expressed fondness for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, has since suggested that Moscow was behind the DNC hack in an effort to boost Trump’s candidacy. Federal officials echoed that message.
So far, Republicans don’t seem worried. Some say the more the issue is raised, the more it leads back to Clinton’s own scandal.
“If I was the Clinton campaign, I would want to get as far away from felonious conduct as is possible,” GOP strategist Brad Todd said.
But Democrats say the attack is also a way to push the point with voters that Trump is erratic, and has a knack for praising dictators, including, as Vice President Joe Biden said, Vladimir Putin.
“It is not only smart, it’s necessary,” Democratic strategist Matt Canter said, of the Clinton campaign’s decision to go on offense against Trump. “Drawing voters’ attention to Trump’s incoherent and dangerous approach to foreign policy should be among our top priorities.”
