CLINTON'S EMAIL PROBLEMS JUST GOT MUCH WORSE.

Richard Perry/The New York Times

CHRIS CILLIZZA, WASHINGTON POST

One of the two big dominoes in the Hillary Clinton email controversy toppled today: The State Department’s inspector general released its report on the email practices of Clinton and a number of other past secretaries of state. (The other major domino is, of course, the FBI investigation into Clinton’s decision to exclusively use a private email server while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.)

The report, which you can read in its entirety here, badly complicates Clinton’s past explanations about the server and whether she complied fully with the laws in place governing electronic communication. And it virtually ensures that Clinton’s email practices will be front and center in Donald Trump’s fusillade of attacks against her credibility and honesty between now and Nov. 8.

Here’s the key passage from the Roz Helderman and Tom Hamburger article on the report:

The inspector general found that Clinton’s use of private email for public business was “not an appropriate method” of preserving documents and that her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed.

 The report says Clinton should have printed and saved her emails during her four years in office or surrendered her work-related correspondence immediately upon stepping down in February 2013. Instead, Clinton provided those records in December 2014, nearly two years after leaving office.

Clinton used an inappropriate method of preserving her documents. Her approach would not have been approved if it had been requested by a more junior member of the State Department staff.  The report also suggests that despite a Clinton aide’s insistence that the method of preserving her emails had been submitted to a legal review back in 2010, there is no evidence that such a review took place. And, here’s the kicker: Clinton refused to sit for a formal interview.

Oomph. Double oomph. Heck, that might merit a triple oomph.

Clinton’s team has spent months casting the State Department inspector general’s office as overly aggressive and working hand in hand with congressional Republicans to cast the former secretary of state in the worst possible light.

That’s a very hard story to sell, given that the current inspector general was appointed by President Obama. It is, by the way, the same problem Clinton faces when she tries to cast skepticism on the ongoing FBI investigation. This is an FBI that is overseen by an attorney general — Loretta E. Lynch — who was also appointed by Obama. It’s tough to make the case that a Democratic administration filled with Democratic appointees are all somehow out to get the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Then there is the argument that Clinton was far from the first secretary of state to use less-than-airtight methods to ensure the preservation and security of her email correspondence. As the IG report makes clear, she wasn’t. Again, Helderman and Hamburger:

The 83-page report reviews email practices by five secretaries of state and generally concludes that recordkeeping has been spotty for years.

It was particularly critical of former secretary of state Colin Powell — who has acknowledged publicly that he used a personal email account to conduct business — concluding that he too failed to follow department policy designed to comply with public-record laws.

There are two very important differences among Clinton, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, and former secretaries Powell and Condoleezza Rice when it comes to email practices.

The first is that Clinton is the first and, to date, only secretary of state to exclusively use a private email address and server to conduct her business as the nation’s top diplomat.  All of the other names above maintained both a private and a government-issued email address. That alone doesn’t make her guilty. But it does make her unique.

Because of her elevated status in our political world, she is — and should be — subject to more scrutiny than, say, Powell, who hasn’t voiced an interest in running for president in 20 years. That’s particularly true because Clinton has put her time at State at the center of her argument for why she should be elected the 45th president of the United States. Look at what I have done and judge me by it, she says. That has to include the bad as well as the good.

This is a bad day for Clinton’s presidential campaign. Period. For a candidate already struggling to overcome a perception that she is neither honest nor trustworthy, the IG report makes that task significantly harder. No one will come out of this news cycle — with the exception of the hardest of the hard-core Clinton people — believing she is a better bet for the presidency on May 25 than she was on May 23.

Clinton remains blessed that Republicans are on the verge of nominating Donald Trump, a candidate whose numbers on honesty, trustworthiness and even readiness to lead are worse — and in some cases, far worse — than hers. But Trump’s task of casting her as “Crooked Hillary” just got easier.

 CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times

NY TIMES

 A presidential campaign always contends with incoming fire, but it is also designed to serve as an infomercial to present a candidate’s best attributes. Instead, Mrs. Clinton has gone from a 69 percent approval rating and one of the most popular public figures in the country when she left the State Department in 2013 to having one of the highest disapproval ratings of any likely presidential nominee of a major party.

Roughly 53 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of Mrs. Clinton in a new ABC-News Washington Post poll. Some 60 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Trump.

When asked if Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump are “honest and trustworthy,” 64 percent of registered voters replied “no,” according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll. Ask voters why they don’t trust Mrs. Clinton, and again and again they will answer with a single word: Emails.

But the Clinton campaign’s new effort to define Mr. Trump as a con man who rips off the little guy for his own gain will be met with the trickle of new developments related to Mrs. Clinton’s private email. The F.B.I. is separately investigating whether Mrs. Clinton and her aides exposed sensitive national security information in their email correspondence. 

5 KEY POINTS FROM THE REPORT

• Hillary Clinton should have asked for approval to use a private email address and server for official business. Had she done so, the State Department would have said no.
• She should have surrendered all of her emails before leaving the administration. Not doing so violated department policies that comply with the Federal Records Act.
• When her deputy suggested putting her on a State Department account, she expressed concern about her personal emails being exposed.
• In January 2011, the Clintons' IT consultant temporarily shut down its private server because, he wrote, he believed "someone was trying to hack us."
• The State Department began disciplinary proceedings against Scott Gration, then the American ambassador to Kenya, for refusing to stop using his personal email for official business.