Hillary's Fate

(AP Photo)

Hillary Clinton’s press conference was an attempt to “put this all behind us,” as all such press conferences are. But that stratagem works only when you give the press and the wags some other bone to gnaw on — which was the purpose behind Clinton’s opening salvo at the 47 GOP senators and their letter to Tehran.

Although I believe the GOP senators showed poor political judgement, they did nothing illegal or unethical. And so Hillary’s attack simply wasn’t a big enough bone.

The next step is to simply ignore the story until it fades, which, absent any damning emails (those were all vetted and deleted for sure), is a pretty safe bet. But now there’s this:

The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, comes a day after Clinton broke her silence about her use of a private email account while secretary of state. The FOIA requests and lawsuit seek materials related to her public and private calendars, correspondence involving longtime aides likely to play key roles in her expected campaign for president, and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices.

“After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, The Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time,” said Karen Kaiser, AP’s general counsel.

This is a very big deal. State can fight the AP and try to protect the former Secretary — and draw the lawsuit out for months. Or State can surrender and say “here’s all we’ve got.”

The trouble is that Hillary’s server is privately owned, and that Clinton has deleted anything incriminating and or/juicy. So State can fight — and keep the story in the headlines for months. Or State can surrender — but they don’t actually have anything worth surrendering. Either way, the burning paper bag full of dogpoop ends up on Hillary’s doorstep.

It’s difficult to see how she fully recovers from this. But it’s easy to imagine how she might be mortally wounded by it. And, as noted earlier today, Clinton has no one to blame but herself.

We have here a modern tale of hubris worthy of the ancient Greeks.

Related: Ed Driscoll on Hillary in the Bunker.