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Email scandals have cost previous presidential campaigns
Some argue that Hillary Clinton's emails lost her the 2016 Presidential election.
The argument
"— -- Donald Trump ended one of the sharpest exchanges in last night's debate against Hillary Clinton with a pointed question: "Why did she delete 33,000 emails?" Clinton is doing her best to move beyond the controversy over her use of a private email server as secretary of state, saying only last night that she "made a mistake" and declining to address why those emails were deleted."
Premises
Counter-arguments
A rebuttal is that the Clinton analogy breaks at the decisive point. The email controversy concerned Clinton's own conduct as a candidate and public official; Hunter Biden is a separate adult family member. That a candidate's personal scandal damaged their own campaign shows nothing about whether an adult relative's actions should reflect on a different candidate. Critics add that the argument slides from "scandals can hurt campaigns" to "this relative's conduct implicates this candidate," which is precisely the point in dispute. Without a link between Joe Biden's own actions and his son's, the precedent of a self-inflicted scandal does not transfer.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The Clinton email controversy concerned her own conduct as candidate and official, not a family member's actions, so it is not analogous to Hunter Biden's situation. [Rejecting P2] That one candidate's personal scandal damaged their campaign shows scandals can hurt candidates, not that a relative's conduct should reflect on a different candidate.