Conservative talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh suggested in a recent broadcast that President Obama and his team might be trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton and her presumed run for president in 2016 – that the whole email scandal was a fabricated executive-level plot.
His line of thinking: Obama doesn't want the next president to "unravel" his policies and programs, particularly Obamacare, Limbaugh said, according to Mediaite. And if moves were afoot to do just that, Obama's "going to call his buddies in the press, he's going to be all over the media trying to stop it," he said during his show.
Limbaugh also said Obama is a bit concerned that Clinton is going to spend the next few months – the entrance to campaign season – trying to "differentiate herself from him." The email scandal, in that case, would prove a substantial distraction from any negative press generated by Clinton's presumed campaign rhetoric.
Or a third possibility, Limbaugh said: Perhaps Team Obama is "a little angry about how [the Clintons] get away with everything." Maybe Obama's jealous, he said.
"Maybe he's worried that Hillary would do a better job that he's done and wouldn't want to have the next Democrat president end up looking better than he does," Limbaugh said. "I think that's entirely possible."
White House spokesman Josh Earnest, meanwhile, calls such conjecture – that the executive branch has anything to do with releasing information about Clinton's private, home-based email server to the press – "pure baloney," he said, according to various media reports.