Hillary Clinton's poor trustworthiness numbers stemming from her email scandal are "eye-popping," a CNN panel said Sunday, and one reporter said many Bernie Sanders backers will not get behind her candidacy as a result.
The Department of Justice elected not to file charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information through her illicit private server at the State Department. However, the FBI still said she had been "extremely careless" with classified material and officially refuted her oft-repeated talking point that she never sent or received such information on her server. Comey added if Clinton had been an FBI employee and engaged in such behavior, it was possible she would be fired.
Clinton was "in a weaker position than a month ago," CNN host John King noted, as Donald Trump has pulled effectively even with Clinton in the polls. King also quoted a CBS News / New York Times poll showing 67 percent of registered voters do not find her honest and trustworthy.
"That's an eye-popping number," King said. "It's also worse than it was a month ago."
King said the effect of Comey's condemnation of her practices had struck a chord with her supporters.
"It was remarkable, talking to people last week, Clinton allies ... about the impact of Comey, about how essentially it was a bag of bricks just put on her back in the sense that she already had honest and trustworthiness was already a question, but they say that it just pounded her," King said.
Reporter Manu Raju said the Comey press conference provided a lot of "ammunition" for Republicans against her.
She hoped to change the story this week when Sanders, more than a month after losing the nomination to Clinton, finally endorsed her on Tuesday. However, the lack of enthusiasm on his end was palpable. The Washington Free Beacon reported that many of his fans in the New Hampshire audience felt angry and betrayed that he'd gotten behind Clinton.
Reporter Maeve Reston relayed that Sanders supporters who spoke to her refused flat-out to support Clinton.
"They believe that the Clintons think that they operate and live by a different system," Reston said. "They continue to have trust issues, and many of them said to me there's no way that I'm going to vote for her, no matter what Bernie Sanders says."