(CN) — As the race for the White House entered its final hours Monday, Wikileaks disclosed the last batch of emails hacked from Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. But the thousands of leaks don't appear to have damaged Clinton's image where it matters most: in the minds of voters.
This past July, when Wikileaks first hinted at the possession of a cache of emails related to Clinton, the group's founder Julian Assange publicly declared he had information that "could proceed to an indictment."
These pronouncements were made after Wikileaks released hacked emails of seven staffers at the Democratic National Committee, causing a shockwave that shook the upper levels of the DNC and culminated with the resignation of party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
But after Clinton's expected post-Democratic Convention bounce in late July, Assange began alluding to the Podesta emails and said he had enough to harm Clinton's campaign for the presidency.
Since Oct. 7, Wikileaks has released anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 emails per day hacked from Podesta's account.
But while the emails have provided insight into the mechanics of Clinton's campaign — staffers and allies developing slogans, addressing their candidate's shortcomings, managing the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation, the private server scandal and her battle with an insurgent candidate in Bernie Sanders — there was a notable lack of incriminating evidence as to Clinton's perceived corruption.
Even the most damning of the emails have an air of ambivalence about them, shooting down claims that Assange has unearthed the smoking gun.
Perhaps the most prominent example came in an email dated March 2, 2015, in which Podesta urges longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills to dump Clinton's emails.
"We are going to have to dump those emails so better to do so sooner than later," he wrote.
While Clinton's opponents have attempted to use this as evidence of a mass cover-up by claiming that Podesta encouraged Mills to delete Clinton's emails en masse, others argue that the word dump — when it comes to emails — is synonymous with disclosure.
In other words, Podesta could just as easily have been asking Mills to prepare to all of the emails for disclosure to the State Department as asking her to scrub them. And the fact that his time frame was a casual "sooner than later" rather than the "immediately" one would expect from someone racing to prevent disclosure lends more credence to the innocuous interpretation.
Similarly, another email from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin offers the same interpretative ambiguities.
"Just to give you some context, the condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation," Abedin wrote to a group of Clinton staffers on Jan. 8, 2015.
Abedin told staffers that Moroccan leaders agreed to host an important conference at Hillary Clinton's request and it would "break a lot of china to back out now."
She added, "The King has personally committed approximately $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting. She created this mess and she knows it."
Clinton critics have claimed Abedin's email unmistakably demonstrates that Hillary Clinton engaged in pay-to-play schemes, pressuring foreign dignitaries to contribute to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for access to her when she was Secretary of State. They say the "she created this mess" line is proof, but it could just as easily be an aide expressing frustration over a scheduling snafu.
