First batch of Hillary Clinton emails released: Why she wants it to go away ASAP

The first word from the State Department was that it was going to release emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that she had turned over from her controversial private email server in January 2016.

Great timing, you have to suspect, considering there’s a presidential nomination race that will be heating up on or around, oh, what, around January 2016?

It’s no surprise that State is now backtracking on that timeline, releasing a small batch of the emails, roughly 300, of the more than 30,000 that she turned over, on Friday.

Nor is it a surprise to see the first batch of the emails released on a Friday before a three-day holiday weekend, a classic bad-news dump day, with people thinking about, in this case, Memorial Day, and anything other than politics.

For the few of us paying attention, we’re being assured by State and by Clinton that we can please disperse, because there’s nothing to see here.

“The emails we release today do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the attacks,” the State Department noted in a tweet.

Clinton addressed the release at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Friday, saying she would “like to see it expedited, so we could get more of them out more quickly.”

It’s actually likely true that there is nothing explosive, politically or otherwise, in the emails, given how thoroughly Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State has been reviewed by Republican partisans in Congress.

That said, her desire to see the release of the rest of her trove of emails from her tenure expedited makes utmost political sense. Whether there’s anything in there or not, it’s obvious that political hay is going to be made of whatever can be made into hay, or something resembling hay.

Might as well get it all out now, while the gettin’ is good, as the saying goes.

Clinton would love to have the matters hashed out during the relatively uncompetitive Democratic primary season so that she can have her responses battle-tested in time for the fall of 2016.

The sooner those emails get out into the public domain, the sooner she will come under attack from the left, right, middle and elsewhere, and the better she can position herself to respond when response will be most important.

Which isn’t Memorial Day weekend, 2015, but the three to four weeks before Election Day, 2016.

That’s the game you’re seeing played out here as you head to your family cookout.

– Column by Chris Graham