Hillary Clinton emails: How the latest twists could jeopardise the Democratic nominee's presidential hopes

Trump's call for a special prosecutor is meant to remind voters of the Bill Clinton scandals

The Democratic nominee downplayed her email troubles on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ on Monday (AP)

For weeks she was able to sit back and watch as controversy after controversy washed over Donald Trump, but suddenly Hillary Clinton is facing a fresh wave of potential scandals of her own. Worse, they threaten to climax just as the country votes in November.

The two sources of her problems are beginning to merge much as two weather depressions might collide and become a hurricane. One is the already well-trodden matter of her use of a private email server while Secretary of State. The other relates to the Clinton Foundation and whether donors received preferential access to her while she served in that post.

Two bombs dropped on the Clinton campaign at once on Monday. First it emerged that the FBI has collected and delivered to the State Department almost 15,000 new emails not previously seen and a federal judge ordered the department to accelerate their release to the public. Meanwhile, a conservative group called Judicial Watch released details of still more emails detailing exactly how donors to the foundation set about trying to get Ms Clinton’s attention.

Ms Clinton will continue to rely on Mr Trump to step on his own campaign. But she also knows that between now and election day she will be forced into some damage control of her own. For her supporters who thought her email woes were behind her, it’s a worrying and confusing turn.

Didn’t the FBI clear Ms Clinton of wrongdoing, so what are these new emails about?

True, but on Monday we learned that the bureau had dug up an additional 15,000 emails that were were sent either to or from Ms Clinton while she was Secretary of State or were part of email chains involving her. They may include some emails she originally declined to hand over to the State Department and in fact deleted alleging they were purely personal in nature.

So are we to expect another drip-drip of revelations from this latest batch?

A federal judge ordered the State Department to accelerate the process of sorting through the latest emails and release them accordingly. In reality that means the first of them could be made public in October – within weeks of the country voting. Should any smoking gun emerge at the last moment showing an instance where national security was seriously compromised by Ms Clinton’s reliance on a private server the damage to her could be severe.

What’s the Clinton Foundation got to do with any of this?

Questions have been swirling for weeks about whether or not Ms Clinton was drawn into giving special favours to some of her husband’s pals in return for their giving generously to the charitable foundation he set up after leaving the presidency – a pay and play arrangement. On Monday, Judicial Watch unveiled details that showed exactly how that might have happened thanks to emails it had accessed through the courts sent to and from Huma Abedin, a close Clinton confidante and her deputy chief of staff during her four years at the State Department.

What are we talking about here?

One email shows Doug Band, a senior figure at the foundation, pushing Ms Abedin for a face-to-face meeting between Ms Clinton and Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the crown prince of Bahrain, while he was in Washington DC in June 2009. “Good friend of ours”, Mr Band said of the crown prince. At the time his government had given $50,000 to the foundation and the prince had participated in one of its annual gatherings in New York, the Clinton Global Initiative.

On another occasion a well-known friend of Bill Clinton, a sports advertising executive named Casey Wasserman, emailed Ms Abedin asking for help in securing a tourist visa for a British football player (his name was redacted from the email before Judicial Watch released it) so he could join his team at the time, Wolverhampton Wanderers, on a trip to Las Vegas. The problem was that the player in question had a criminal record.

So did Ms Abedin – and therefore Ms Clinton by extension – ever oblige?

There is nothing in the emails released on Monday that would appear to establish a direct link between a donor to the foundation and any particular favours extended to them by the State Department at the time. Though perhaps the closest to it happened in the case of the Bahraini crown prince who was granted time with Ms Clinton. But in her email replying to Mr Band, Ms Abedin was at pains to stress that the meeting had been set up “thru official channels”.

How has Ms Clinton responded to the Judicial Watch email release?

Dismissively. Josh Schwerin, a campaign spokesman, characterised Judicial Watch as a “right-wing organization that has been going after the Clintons since the 1990s” and which is well known for “distorting facts to make utterly false attacks”. His statement went on: “No matter how this group tries to mischaracterise these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation.”

And what about Mr Trump?

He is taking full advantage and went so far on Monday as to demand that a special prosecutor be appointed to look into the whole gamut of her email affairs and the relationship between the State Department under her watch and the foundation. “No issue better illustrates how corrupt my opponent is than her pay for play scandals as secretary of state,“ he said at a rally in Ohio. ”I've become increasingly shocked by the vast scope of Hillary Clinton's criminality. It's criminality. Everybody knows it.”

Has Bill Clinton become involved?

In attempt to forestall the trouble that is already upon his wife, Mr Clinton announced this week that should she win the presidency, several things will change at his Foundation. First and foremost it would cease to take money from any foreign governments and donors and only from US-based charities and individuals. He would also step down from the foundation entirely and cease personally to raise funds for it.

Assuming Ms Clinton is found not to have broken any laws isn’t all this just background noise?

It is, but it matters for this reason: voters of a certain age, including women who might normally feel inclined to back Ms Clinton, still remember how the Clinton presidencies almost became overwhelmed by congressional investigations into the President and his wife. It began with questions about property speculation they had engaged in in Arkansas and ended with the allegation that the President had lied about an affair. These scandals were exhausting for the country and many voters are simply afraid that with Ms Clinton in the White House the whole tawdry cycle will just start all over again and nothing else with get done in Washington.

* Lawyers representing the crown prince of Bahrain, HRH Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al- Khalifa, have asked us to make clear that their client has never made a personal donation to the Clinton Foundation and that he would regard any suggestion to the contrary as ‘‘wholly untrue’’. 20/9/16