From the final Morning Jolt of the week:

Hillary Just Failed Her First Test as a Candidate
Picture it: Hillary Clinton beats Jeb Bush in the 2016 election. It’s November 2017, nine months into her presidency, and press reports suddenly reveal that none of the proposed reforms at the Department of Veterans Affairs from 2014 had any real effect.
CNN and Fox News interview widows of veterans who died waiting for treatment. Whistleblowers come forward, declaring the reports of reduced wait times sent from the VA hospitals to Washington are faked again. They say they did everything they could to warn high-level officials in the Hillary Clinton administration but no one wanted to listen. Republicans on Capitol Hill collect example after example that the VA has failed in its duties again.
In the face of massive public outrage, President Hillary Clinton goes into the bunker. She emerges only for prearranged speeches to Emily’s List and NARAL, and for a speech in Manhattan about the need for equal pay on Wall Street. She ignores all questions; the press is kept far from her in the back of the room. Bill Clinton is unreachable, on a trip to meet with Clinton Foundation donors in Dubai, the Mediterranean, and Southeast Asia, with no press traveling with him.
Four days into the story, the official presidential Twitter account offers one statement: “I and my entire administration have always cared about veterans. hrc” There is no word on what her VA secretary knew or when he knew it; he, too, goes into the bunker and avoids the press.
Meanwhile, White House press secretary David Brock goes out every day at the White House press-room podium, and then afterwards to MSNBC, to attack the reporters of these stories, declaring them “hearsay and rumor” and denouncing the widows for suggesting the Clinton administration doesn’t care about veterans.
It’s not such an unimaginable scenario, right?
At the peak of the Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton told Dick Morris, “We’ll just have to win then.” Charles Krauthammer, back in 1998:
Morris returns with polls showing that if it is just adultery, the public will forgive him. But if it is perjury or obstruction of justice, he’s dead. Clinton’s response: “Well, we just have to win then.”
So out he goes, and win he does. He takes to TV and delivers one of the most skillfully faked bald-faced lies in American history, a lie delivered, in the words of his loyal friend of 30 years, Robert Reich, with “passionate intensity” and “stunning conviction” recalling “the great Method actors of a previous generation.” Result? His polls soar. Disaster is averted. He wins.
A former Clinton aide has expressed doubts about the Morris story. But Morris or not, the polls back in January were absolutely clear: if Clinton lied under oath, 63% of Americans thought he should resign.
So Clinton went with the polls. It was win-win. Either he would be able to stonewall forever or, if truth was finally forced out, the more time that passed, the more opinion might change. And change it did. Seven months and dozens of corroborating leaks later, Americans had grown accustomed to the idea of not just a dallying President but of a lying, perjuring one.
We’re seeing the same pattern again. A Clinton hand has been caught in the cookie jar. She broke rules and laws. The behavior is shady, slimy, secretive, self-interested. The hypocrisy is epic, as then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton directed employees not to use personal email accounts for official business due to security concerns. There’s no innocuous explanation.
So what are we seeing in response? Circle the wagons. Bully the press. Call in every favor. Cry “havoc” and let slip the dogs of partisan media narrative war. Counterattack. Draw moral equivalence. Flood the zone, fire off chaff, and throw everything up against the wall and see what sticks.
Delay, and delay, and delay. And then, when she finally emerges from the hermetically sealed sarcophagus that protects her from questions about these e-mails, or foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, or Bibi Netanyahu’s speech, or Obama’s deal with Iran . . . insist that it’s all old news.
No, really, that’s exactly what the plan is, and her team is bragging about it:
Clinton and her team are aware that her tactics will only hold out for so long and that she’ll eventually have to answer questions about her e-mail practices, but she and her advisers are aiming to delay that moment, ideally until she formally announces she’s running for president. At that point, they hope, the controversy will have subsided to the point where her campaign launch will be a much bigger headline than her response to a month-old scandal. An added benefit to the approach: the potential for Republicans to overreach and overreact while Clinton stays silent.