A flurry of events set to unfold in the coming days and months could push back into the headlines the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, providing plenty of fodder for Donald Trump and his "Crooked Hillary" attack line.

Republicans are hoping for — and in some cases plotting — a summer of scandal for Clinton that helps tarnish and distract her presidential campaign as she tries to build momentum for a fall showdown with the Manhattan billionaire.


A long-awaited State Department inspector general report on the impact of personal email use on recordkeeping at State was released to lawmakers on Wednesday, and concluded that Clinton violated the agency's records rules. And as many Americans prepare for the traditional Memorial Day kickoff to the summer season, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills is scheduled to sit for a sworn deposition Friday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch.

Mills’ testimony would be the first known time a member of Clinton’s inner circle has been questioned under oath in the email controversy. Another top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, is set to testify next month. And Clinton herself is awaiting a judge's ruling on whether she should be required to give a deposition.

No matter how that comes out, Clinton also faces an ongoing FBI investigation into the email set up. Some of her aides have already been questioned. She's expressed a willingness to sit down with investigators — something they're expected to take her up on in the next few weeks. Unless it takes place in complete secrecy, such a session would be the highest-profile legal spectacle the former first lady has faced since she testified 20 years ago before a federal grand jury investigating the disappearance and reappearance of Whitewater billing records.

"I think the [Office of Inspector General] report is going to be of interest and the testimony is going to be out there," said Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton. "I think the courts will take action this summer....I don't see any of this going away."

On top of all that, there's an expected House report on Benghazi. And a slew of planned document releases from the State Department that a conservative group is planning to make into a movie.

"We have been for months and we will be for the next several months on the receiving end of document productions from the State Department and others," said David Bossie of Citizens United, another conservative organization. "We have been and continue to be in the works on a Hillary documentary....We'd like to have something launch on or around the the Democratic Convention."

Trump has also indicated he's planning to turn up the heat on the issue, once Clinton has finished fighting out the battle for the Democratic nomination with Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Sanders "didn’t pick up on the emails, which I think was a big mistake," Trump said Sunday on Fox News. " I’m going to pick up bigly. Because frankly she shouldn’t even be allowed to run for president.”

Clinton allies are bracing for the onslaught and have already moved to take the sting out of some of the potential blows.

"All of this has been a political hit job from the beginning," said David Brock of the pro-Clinton group Correct the Record. "Whether it’s the report being written in the State Department’s Office of Inspector General with the help of a former confidante of Chuck Grassley, at the same time Senator Grassley has been on a political crusade to hurt Hillary Clinton, or the final report of the discredited House Benghazi Committee, we will do as we have from the beginning: preempt, debunk and push back on these partisan lies.”

Earlier this month, as word spread that the release of the inspector general's report was nearing, Brock's group sought to discredit the probe by convening a conference call with reporters. Longtime Democratic attorney Joe Sandler highlighted the complaints of conflicts of interest, charges that the inspector general's office and Grassley aides have denied.

The IG report did provide some cover to Clinton, finding that the agency suffers from "longstanding, systemic weaknesses" with records that "go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State. But is also specifically states Clinton did not follow the agency's rules.

“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” the report says. “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."

Clinton's supporters on Capitol Hill are also at work trying to bolster her case and uncover facts her backers can rely on.

Earlier this month, three Democratic senators obtained a letter from the State Department suggesting that reports about 2,100 classified emails were found in Clinton's account may have exaggerated the import of that claim. A top State official suggested there was nothing wrong with Clinton handling about 2,000 of those messages in unclassified channels because they were only classified in order to prevent the release of those messages to the public following FOIA requests.

State legislative affairs chief Julia Frifield wrote in the letter that diplomats "routinely" handle foreign government information on unclassified systems and their jobs essentially require that. Frifield's stance doesn't erase questions about sensitive intelligence information that intelligence agencies say was in several dozen messages in Clinton's account, but it does undercut claims that Clinton's server was rife with data that should have always been treated as classified.

Some Democrats also hope they can change the subject or at least neutralize some of the attacks on Clinton by pointing to Trump's legal woes. He's facing three lawsuits charging that his Trump University real estate seminar program was a scam. And he's been ordered to appear at a deposition of his own next month to answer questions related to lawsuits he filed after two chefs citing his anti-immigrant rhetoric backed out of plans to open restaurants at his planned Trump International Hotel in Washington.

A Clinton campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but many in her camp appear to have staked their hopes on the FBI largely burying the email controversy by deciding not to prosecute anyone involved. Some press reports in recent weeks have said investigators haven't found any evidence of criminal intent, but FBI Director James Comey has said the probe is ongoing. It also seems unlikely any final decisions will be made until after agents interview Clinton.

“Let the FBI finish its investigation. Let the FBI do its job,” Brad Woodhouse of the pro-Clinton group Correct the Record told reporters earlier this month. “We trust that process. We’d like to see that process through.”

Comey recently declined to comment when asked how or if his agency would let the public know if the probe is closed and what it found. Public statements of that sort are uncommon, but in some high profile investigations like the inquiry into former IRS employee Lois Lerner, the Justice Department has sent letters to Congress outlining why charges were not brought.

Conservative activists say that a decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton won't divert their quest to get to the bottom of the email issue and could even speed it by allowing access to some of the FBI's investigative records, including whatever the agency was able to recover of 32,000 emails Clinton's lawyers deleted after deeming them to be personal.

"A decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton made by political appointees of President Obama will not be accepted and will have to be reevaluated by any new administration," Fitton said. "Partisans for Mrs. Clinton might be satisfied but independent-minded folks concerned about the rule of law...aren't going to be satisfied."

Congressional committees are also poised to swoop in as soon as the FBI probe ends, although it's unclear whether they'll be able to hold hearings before the election given the lengthy recesses scheduled in those months.

Whatever is discovered through the ongoing probes, lawsuits and depositions, Bossie said he's confident that they will throw Clinton off her game.

"Whether it's the Benghazi report, the state IG report or other types of releases, those are just a variation of bad for Hillary Clinton because on that day and time whenever those happen it is taking her off her message and making her have to answer questions related to these issues that she doesn't want to talk about," the veteran GOP operative said. "That's called winning, if you're Donald Trump."

