Politico: Hillary Campaign Plans ‘Run-Out-the-Clock Strategy’ to Dodge Clinton Foundation Scandals

Annie Karni writes in Politico that Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to ignore the mounting pay-to-play corruption scandals surrounding the Clinton Foundation. Instead, the Democratic Party’s nominee sees “a shrinking calendar as her friend” and hopes to run out the clock between now and the November election.

She is not planning on sitting for another televised armchair confessional to rehash regrets about a private email server. Nor is the campaign setting up the kind of war room employed last year to discredit a book that aimed to expose a quid-pro-quo relationship between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department officials.

With 75 days until Election Day and new emails once again casting a pall over her campaign, Hillary Clinton aims to “run out the clock,” confidants say, on the latest chapters of the overlapping controversies that have dogged her campaign since the start.

According to allies and operatives close to the campaign, Clinton’s team thinks “they can ride out” any negative reaction to a set of new emails that show Clinton Foundation officials trying to set up State Department meetings for donors during her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.

“That doesn’t mean no response,” one Clinton team insider said, “but a muted one rather than a five-alarm fire.”

It’s a strategy borne, in part, of a belief held deeply by Clinton herself that the email controversy is a fake scandal and that voters are as sick of it as the candidate herself — and by the profound weaknesses of Clinton’s opponent.

[…]

“There’s a chance that Trump gets better, and that some sort of mythical new information comes out of the emails,” said Mo Elleithee, director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and a veteran of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “But in the absence of that, the Clinton people seem to be content with keeping their heads down, letting her deliver her positive case and allowing Trump to continue to cloud the national conversation with his own unforced errors.”

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