Close allies of Hillary Clinton are encouraging the Democratic front-runner to spend less time honing her attacks on Donald Trump — and more time focusing on a clear and positive message about her own campaign.

But the State Department inspector general’s report released last week has thrown an email-shaped roadblock into Clinton’s path as she attempts to whittle down her high negative ratings. And that has complicated the already difficult task of reshaping perceptions about a universally known candidate.


“From her point of view, establishing positives is far more important to winning,” Mark Penn, Clinton’s former chief strategist who remains close to the family, said in a rare interview about the current campaign. "Why spend so much energy attacking Trump, what difference does it make, when he’s over 57 percent negative and she has a lot of leadership qualities that have gone unsung? It's like beating a dead horse.”

Trump and Clinton are currently tied on unfavorability, with 57 percent of registered voters saying they hold unfavorable views of the candidates, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week. The ongoing email saga, which has been hanging over Clinton since before she even launched her campaign, has played a role in eroding voters' sense of trust in the former secretary of state.

But whatever the cause of her high unfavorables, Penn said, the category of voters who dislike both Clinton and Trump is simply “too big. The real key to her election now is less about thumping Trump and more raising her positive leadership and vision.”

It's a point many Democrats have begun to make as Clinton spends more time on the trail attacking Trump, even amid hand-wringing about Clinton’s slow response to his attacks. While it's necessary to go after her rival, said another 2008 campaign veteran, Geoff Garin, now a pollster for Priorities USA, "there would be a real benefit in building her positive case.”

That task, however, was impeded yet again as Clinton campaigned across California last week. New questions about her use of a private email server while she was at the State Department emerged with the release of the IG report — the email issue still hampering her ability to get out a clear message, 13 months after she first pointed her Scooby van toward Iowa.

There was no smoking gun in the long-anticipated IG report, which did not conclude that Clinton broke the law. But its release created unwanted smoke at a moment when Clinton is hoping to end Bernie Sanders’ stubborn primary challenge and define herself, as well as the stakes of a general election, ahead of the two conventions this summer.

Instead of hammering home her message of inclusion, or celebrating her status as the first woman on the verge of becoming her party’s nominee, Clinton was on the email ropes again Tuesday, one week before the California primary.

"I think what she did was very bad and I think a lot of people have done a lot less than her and their lives have been destroyed,” Trump said at a news conference Tuesday when asked whether Clinton committed a felony.

There is no proof that she did — and even Trump stopped short of accusing Clinton of breaking the law. But after saying she would cooperate fully with investigations into her email use, Clinton declined to be interviewed, the 83-page report revealed.

The report also revealed that State Department officials who brought up concerns about the private email server were told “never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again” and that Clinton never asked permission to set up her private email server. It all fed the worst caricatures painted by Clinton's detractors — that she’s pathologically dishonest. So did the lack of a detailed explanation of why Bryan Pagliano, a State Department employee, was providing her with technical support when his supervisors were unaware of the arrangement.

Those questions are likely to remain in a gray area until November: Clinton’s game plan moving forward is to keep her head down and move the email issue to the side rather than try and explain it all away, while reiterating that what she did was a mistake, campaign officials said.

“At this point, there is no such thing as a low-information voter on the issue of emails, and yet, Hillary Clinton is set to emerge from the primary with more raw votes than either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump,” said spokesman Brian Fallon. “She has acknowledged it was a mistake and answered the pressing questions on this issue, and now we intend to focus the remaining months of the campaign on the issues most important to working families."

But even while the campaign attempts to push forward a positive message that addresses the issues that matter to voters, Clinton’s message was stymied by email questions on Tuesday.

“I’ve said many times, it was still a mistake and if I could go back I would do it differently,” Clinton told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I understand people may have concerns about this. But I hope voters look at the full picture of everything I've done in my career and the full threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency, and if they do, I have faith in the American people that they will make the right choice here.”

Clinton gave the same answer — verbatim — in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes following her CNN hit. When pressed by Hayes about why her staffers had warned people to stop asking about her use of a private email setup, Clinton did not go off script. “It’s not anything that I am aware of,” she said, shutting down that new line of email inquiry.

"The strategy of, let's tell everyone everything about this, won’t work now and will just result in more questions,” one longtime Clinton ally said of the approach. “The goal now is to how to make this election about something else other than email.”



Last spring, it took months after the news of Clinton’s private email server first broke before the candidate and her campaign reached that same conclusion. Clinton’s lawyerly instincts at first led her to resist advice to go public with everything she had on the issue — and made her grind her heels in when it came to offering an apology for her behavior.

One year and one IG report later, Clinton and her team have been quicker to settle on a response that appears a blend of both instincts — giving not an inch more on the issue, but reiterating that what she did was, in retrospect, wrong. "There's no alternative," another longtime adviser close to Clinton said regarding how to move forward.

Clinton allies said they were relieved to be over one of the two pending investigations — and hoped the FBI would wrap up its investigation soon so that the campaign could move on once and for all.

“There is nothing in it to change anything people thought about Hillary,” Garin said of the IG report. “From the voters’ perspective, what people care about is who’s going to help them and who might hurt them.”

But the ongoing email saga has fueled the perception that Clinton remains evasive, especially with the press that Trump engages with more freely.

Last week, she avoided taking questions from the traveling press corps at rallies across California, even ignoring questions yelled at her from feet away along the rope line. Instead, she settled on responding to the report with one “pooled” television interview, angering the press corps that travels with her, who were given no access to the candidate.

It was a marked difference in tactics from a campaign trip to Las Vegas last August, when Clinton did engage in a rare news conference to answer email questions. There, she made a memorable gaffe while responding to a question about whether she had tried to wipe her server: “What, like, with a cloth or something?”

A campaign aide said Clinton was not trying to avoid another “with a cloth” scenario by passing on a news conference this time around — the aide said the campaign decided against that format because it would have faced criticism from many news outlets for taking questions with only a bare-bones press corps present the week before Memorial Day.

But a single television interview also allowed Clinton to limit her exposure on the issue. “If she starts answering questions,” said one Clinton ally close to the campaign, “it becomes Chinese water torture. I think she has said all there is to say on this and needs to put it behind her. If you start to fall into a trap of responding to every little nuance, you lose.”

“It’s the right strategy,” agreed former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Clinton supporter. “Right now, most voters, except Hillary haters, have decided about the emails. Most voters have decided that she probably make a mistake but that there was nothing illegal about it. Who got harmed? The error has only accrued to herself."