Mystery still surrounds the meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch at a Phoenix airport during the investigation into Hillary’s private email server.
One prominent liberal claims it cost Hillary the election.
But the truth is even more astounding.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank believes the airplane was the deciding factor in the 2016 election.
He wrote in his most recent column:
“So now it can be told: Bill Clinton cost his wife the presidency.
Almost three hours into a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey shed new light on his decision to go public about his agency’s investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails, first in July 2016 and again, with devastating effect, in late October, 11 days before the election.
The specific reason he cited: Bill Clinton’s decision to board Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane in late June, when their planes were both on a tarmac in Phoenix. “The capper was — and I’m not picking on Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who I like very much — but her meeting with President Clinton on that airplane was the capper for me,” Comey said. Comey decided to “step away” and announce, without consulting the Justice Department, that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be charged.”
Comey cited this incident as to why he held a public press conference to detail Hillary’s mishandling of classified information and was not recommending charges.
Liberals believe this event set in motion the chain of events that led to Comey sending a letter to Congress in late October explaining that the FBI was reopening the investigation because emails with classified intelligence were found on disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
Liberal polling guru Nate Silver contends the media coverage of the letter is what sank Hillary.
He wrote on fivethirtyeight.com:
“Clinton’s standing in the polls fell sharply. She’d led Trump by 5.9 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s popular vote projection at 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 28. A week later — after polls had time to fully reflect the letter — her lead had declined to 2.9 percentage points. That is to say, there was a shift of about 3 percentage points against Clinton. And it was an especially pernicious shift for Clinton because (at least according to the FiveThirtyEight model) Clinton was underperforming in swing states as compared to the country overall. In the average swing state,3 Clinton’s lead declined from 4.5 percentage points at the start of Oct. 28 to just 1.7 percentage points on Nov. 4. If the polls were off even slightly, Trump could be headed to the White House.”
But this – like Milbank’s belief that Bill Clinton cost Hillary the election – is wrong.
The American Association of Public Opinion Research’s study of the 2016 election blew Silver’s theory out of the water.
Hot Air reports:
“The evidence for a meaningful effect on the election from the FBI letter is mixed at best,” the report states, citing polls that showed Clinton’s support beginning to drop in the days leading up to the letter. “October 28th falls at roughly the midpoint (not the start) of the slide in Clinton’s support.”
In fact, while the Comey letter “had an immediate, negative impact for Clinton on the order of 2 percentage points,” the report finds that Clinton’s support recovered “in the days just prior to the election.”
The liberal media is invested both personally and professionally in excuse making in order to deflect from the real truth that Hillary was a terrible candidate.
But she was the definition of an establishment insider at a time when voters wanted to burn down the status quo – and the American people rejected the idea of four more years of Barack Obama’s policies.
