The Washington Post thinks coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails is officially 'out of control'

The Washington Post is over the whole Hillary Clinton email story

(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

published 9 September 2016

The newspaper that brought down Richard Nixon thinks this whole Hillary Clinton email brouhaha has gone too far. After an exhaustive congressional inquiry, countless FOIA dumps, and fruitless FBI investigation, the final straw was Matt Lauer. "Judging by the amount of time NBC's Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday's national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election," The Washington Post editorial board wrote Thursday night. "It is not."

In an editorial titled "The Hillary Clinton email story is out of control," The Washington Post noted that Lauer spent a third of his 30 minutes with Clinton asking about the server, meaning that crucial national security issues like Chinese maritime aggression and NSA spying "did not even get mentioned in the first of 5½ precious prime-time hours the two candidates will share before Election Day." But sadly, the Post continues, "Lauer's widely panned handling of the candidate forum was not an aberration." This obsession with Clinton's emails is reflected in polls that show voters trust Donald Trump more than Clinton.

Clinton "is hardly blameless," the editorial concedes, but her "emails have endured much more scrutiny than an ordinary person's would have, and the criminal case against her was so thin that charging her would have been to treat her very differently." The email story "has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts," and "there is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton's wrongs and Mr. Trump's manifest unfitness for office." You can read the entire editorial at The Washington Post.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.

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