USA Today Senior Political Reporter Heidi Przybyla predicted that if Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is indicted, “It’s game over. The superdelegates would bail from her” and that things would be “sticky and ugly” if one of Hillary’s close top staffers is indicted on Thursday’s “Shepard Smith Reporting” on the Fox News Channel.
Przybyla said, “What we still don’t know right now is whether she personally is a target of that, or one of her aides. Either way it doesn’t look good, right? And — but we also don’t know yet if it’s going to lead to an actual indictment. And if does, then I think this is a pretty black and white issue, right? It’s game over. The superdelegates would bail from her. The pledged delegates, maybe at the convention on the first round might feel obligated to support her, but then they would all peel off, too, and the Democrats, like you teased at the top, would be — you think there’s disarray right now on the GOP side, you would see a total meltdown on the Democratic side. But that’s all a lot of ifs.”
She added of a Hillary alternative if she is indicted “I don’t think it would be [Democratic candidate Senator] Bernie Sanders (I-VT). I think that there would be somebody…like Joe Biden would step up or Cuomo, or maybe Deval Patrick, someone like that.”
Przybyla further stated that if Hillary isn’t indicted, but some of her close, top staffers are, “[T]hat’s when it gets sticky and ugly, right? Because, even if it’s not her who is being indicted, if it’s someone very close to her, what kind of stink does that put on to the candidate herself? Because what we have seen in the polls so far is that this email controversy has done a lot to hurt her with Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, but with Democrats, they’ve been a little bit more resistant to having this be the thing that really affects their opinion of her in terms of trustworthiness, but I think if you had somebody who’s really close to her then charged with a crime, it’s not clear that she should step down because of that, and yet, I think you would have a lot of Democrats saying, ‘Wait, this is our nominee.'”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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