Required Reading

Ron Fournier sometimes gets a story he can’t spin against the Republicans, and when he does I like to link the heck out of it to encourage further good behavior. And his work here on Hillary and the Clinton Foundation is devastating:

Under fire, Bill Clinton said his namesake charity has “done a lot more good than harm”—hardly a ringing endorsement. One of his longest-serving advisers, a person who had worked directly for the foundation, told me the “longtime whispers of pay-to-play are going to become shouts.”

This person, a Clinton loyalist and credible source, has no evidence of wrongdoing but said the media’s suspicions are warranted. “The emails are a related but secondary scandal,” the source said. “Follow the foundation money.”

Is the foundation clean? Is it corrupt? Or is the truth in the muddy middle, where we so often find the Clintons? Due to the fact that Hillary Clinton chose to skirt federal regulations and house her State Department emails on an off-the-books server, even the most loyal Democrat can’t honestly answer those questions without an independent vetting of her electronic correspondence.

Without those emails, we may never be able to follow the money. Could that be why she hasn’t coughed up the server?

Read the whole thing, of course.

But before you click over to National Journal, check out Jazz Shaw’s take on Emailgate:

Trey Gowdy was on Face the Nation and, to his credit, Bob Schieffer asked him if there were any gaps in the emails that Hillary had turned over during previous phases of the investigation. Gowdy said there were huge gaps, including the period of time when she was heading to the region and was caught in a photo wearing sunglasses and typing away on her Blackberry. Where is that email? It’s a great question, but there’s a big problem on the horizon. If that email is gone forever then all we’re ever going to have is a question. If you can’t show the juicy bits of what it is that’s actually gone missing, the story stays in the realm of wonkdom and you can just about hear the viewers grabbing their remotes and clicking back over to Sports Center.

The whole point of the server is that it’s politically easier to apologize for gaps than it is to explain away whatever the hell she was up to — which seems likely to have involved lining her family’s deep pockets. And God only knows what else. These are the Clintons, after all. They could somehow manage to break seventeen laws adopting a stray cat.

Politically then, the point for the GOP becomes this.

Absent any devastating emails, the question becomes one of character — leaving it all in the voters hands. So the GOP must ask the question, again and again, what kind of person do you want running the country? Hillary has been in the public spotlight for a quarter century, but she’s covered her tracks so well that we still don’t know really what kind of person she is. Is that, Mr and Mrs Voter, the person you want in the White House?

The emails aren’t going to bring her down. Questions of character might.