Very well said.

Certain members of the committee turned it into a witch hunt specifically about Clinton. Like her or not, she's damn good at deflecting those kind of personal attacks. The republicans played right into her narrative that this was all some thing to hurt her future prospects at president.

It's a story the media is going to cover one way or another, by swinging for the fences as you rightly put it, the media was allowed to choose how they covered it. Instead of being "look at the new facts that just came out that shows clinton lied a couple months ago", it became "well more facts came out today that disproved the republican theory that Hillary is personally responsible".

Show the facts and let people come to their own conclusions, the doubt about her becomes so much stronger then. All the email scandal stuff, they are literally playing right into her (although not as much as the Benghazi commission) again. Instead of just sticking to the facts, "here is what you said, here are the 10 times you changed your story proving you lied about what you previously said, and here are all the rules/laws you violated, oh and here's all this other shady looking stuff, but I want to just focus on the facts that we know and how you broke the law". Instead they focused on all that other stuff instead, even doing it a little bit just lets clinton pivot the entire thing back against you, saying it's some unfounded nut job conspiracy theories, put out by the republicans just to hurt her chances for president.

I honestly thinking we could have given all the information to a kindergartner and he would have been able to do more damage to her than the current republicans had.