GOP warns of ‘long summer for Crooked Hillary’

Hillary Clinton is facing a long summer of scrutiny over her emails and use of a private server during her tenure as secretary of State, the Republican National Committee (RNC) said Wednesday.

As news and criticism about the Democratic presidential front-runner’s personal email setup trickle out in the coming weeks, the Republican Party appears primed to pounce, it indicated in a memo released to the press.

{mosads}“Clinton’s credibility has been torn to shreds, and as her team struggles to spin her obvious breach of the law, her persistent dishonesty has only created a new set of hurdles,” Sean Spicer, the RNC’s communications director and chief strategist, wrote in the memo.

In the memo, Spicer makes clear that Republicans are not going to let up on Clinton over her server, which is set to come under new public scrutiny as the summer heats up.

Wednesday’s memo comes a week after the State Department’s inspector general released a critical report claiming Clinton violated department record-keeping rules and that the server arrangement would not have been approved had she sought approval. The report also unearthed new emails from Clinton that she did not deliver to the department.

The “report reinforces what everyone knows and dislikes about Hillary Clinton,” Spicer said, pointing to a clear vulnerability for the leading Democratic presidential candidate.

“Her use of a secret email server was clearly for the purpose of keeping her public business away from anyone who might hold her accountable,” Spicer wrote.

“If she can’t be trusted with email, how can she be trusted with the White House?”

Moreover, the State Department’s watchdog report “proved Clinton has been lying from the get-go” by claiming that the arrangement was allowed and that she had given all work-related emails over to the State Department, Spicer said.

“Secondly, her top aides are also stonewalling on the investigation because of the spider web of lies Clinton and her team have woven,” Spicer added, pointing to the fact that few of Clinton’s top aides responded to the inspector general’s questions.

In the memo, Spicer repeated the RNC’s use of “Crooked Hillary,” the moniker developed by presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The State Department inspector general report last week was the first public official condemnation of Clinton’s email arrangement.

In coming weeks, Clinton will come under the gun once again, as the FBI wraps up its months-long investigation related to the possibility that she or her aides mishandled classified information, and as depositions proceed in a pair of open-records lawsuits from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Earlier this week, Judicial Watch released the transcript of a seven-hour deposition with Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. That interview indicated that Clinton and her aides were not close with Bryan Pagliano, the IT expert who set up her server and has since been granted immunity in the FBI probe, and showed that Mills’s lawyers fought to restrict what their client could say.  

“Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty has caught up with her again,” Spicer claimed in his Wednesday memo. “And with the Judicial Watch lawsuit and the FBI investigation still rolling full steam ahead, the worst of Hillary Clinton’s woes over her secret email server may still be yet to come.

“It’s going to be a long summer for Crooked Hillary.”