Do we like Hillary Clinton?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record that stands up to scrutiny, marked down for a contested 2019 stumble on trans issues and a few well-documented credibility dents.
Hillary Clinton is a former Secretary of State and the 2016 Democratic nominee, and she has been one of the most scrutinised people in American politics for three decades. That scrutiny is part of why her record is so well documented, for better and for worse.
The email saga is the big one. The FBI director said Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” with classified information, but found no evidence anyone intentionally mishandled it, and the Justice Department closed the probe in July 2016 without charges. So: sloppy, not criminal, and no court ever found otherwise.
On the harm test, her record backs LGBTQ+ people and women. The wobble was 2019, when she nodded along to a Sunday Times question about locker rooms and then spoke of “legitimate concern about women’s lived experience” on BBC radio. Trans activists copped it, and Clinton posted that trans people deserve full equality and pointed to her passport policy change at State.
The recent stuff is mostly Epstein politics. In February she told the House Oversight Committee she did not recall ever encountering Epstein and had no idea about his crimes. She also hit back at Chairman James Comer over how the probe was run, which he rejected as a partisan complaint. Nothing in the reporting we read alleges she did anything wrong.
In June she appeared at 92NY and, asked about Graham Platner, would not say whether she backs him. She called his past behaviour and statements “bumps on the road” and said Susan Collins would be very hard to beat. Where you land depends on whether you read that as sensible caution or as ducking the question.
Overall she is a bit of a lightning rod, and a lot of the heat comes from a sustained political campaign against her. There is no slide into conspiracy theories, nothing against LGBTQ+ people beyond the one botched 2019 interview, and decades of fighting for women and families. The asterisk is real, but so is the pass.