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It’s no surprise, then, that long before WikiLeaks, her approval rating was underwater. The same pre-WikiLeaks CNN poll found that 55 percent of Americans viewed Clinton unfavourably, while just 41 percent viewed her favourably — the lowest favourable rating she had scored in CNN polling in 24 years, going all the way back to April 1992. Gallup had similar results in its poll taken July 16-23. “As the Democratic National Convention gets underway in Philadelphia,” Gallup reported at the time, “Hillary Clinton’s image is at its lowest point in the 24 years of her national career, with 38% of Americans viewing her favorably and 57% unfavorably.”

In other words, the WikiLeaks stories simply confirmed what Americans already knew: that Clinton was dishonest and corrupt.

Moreover, most of the stories that helped Americans reach those conclusions had nothing to do with Russia or WikiLeaks. It was the New York Times that broke the story that Clinton used a private server while she was secretary of state. It was The Post that revealed the Clinton Foundation had accepted millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments while Clinton was secretary of state. It was The Wall Street Journal that exposed the deal Clinton had cut with a Swiss bank to protect tax-dodging Americans while the bank gave $1.5 million in speaking fees to Bill Clinton and $600,000 to the Clinton Foundation. It was ABC News that revealed that the Clinton State Department gave special treatment to “FOBs” (friends of Bill) and “WJC VIPs” (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs) after the Haiti earthquake. It was NBC News that reported that the FBI had discovered emails that appeared to be germane to the Clinton email scandal on a computer seized during an investigation of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner. And it was FBI Director James B. Comey who told the American people that Clinton had been “extremely careless” and the “definition of negligent” in handling classified information.