Hillary Clinton's emails haunting her again!

Once again, Hillary Clinton’s carefully laid campaign plans have been disrupted by old emails.

On a day in which Clinton was hoping to inflict considerable damage on Donald Trump — this time, by ripping into his economic agenda — her campaign was on the defensive, scurrying to clean up the latest damaging revelations in years-old messages that were sent by Clinton and her staff and released as the result of a lawsuit.

The ongoing email dispute undermined the potency of a speech for which Clinton’s campaign had been laying groundwork all week, one in which she presented her economic agenda in full and tried to brand her self-styled populist rival a fraud.

Clinton, speaking in Michigan, did manage to deliver a combative, policy-laden address that effectively rebutted the economic plan that Trump presented in the battleground state days before.  Both are reaching out to the so-called Reagan Democrats who will decide the race’s outcome in the Rust Belt.

But Clinton and Trump continue to be distracted by self-inflicted wounds. Trump’s economic address was overshadowed by his suggestion soon after that maybe gun rights proponents would find a way to stop Clinton from appointing certain judges, which earned him widespread rebuke for casually inciting violence. Then, in unrelated and repeated comments, the Republican bizarrely 

repeatedly accused President Obama and Clinton of founding the Islamic State terrorist group.

But Clinton, too, has had difficulty staying on task. The fresh batch of emails was pried from the State Department thanks to a lawsuit filed by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch. It revealed what appeared to be seedy dealings by Clinton’s team at the agency.

In one message, a top Clinton aide appears to be trying to get a million-dollar donor from the family’s Clinton Foundation access to the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, after an executive at the foundation requested it. In another, the foundation executive appeared to request special help finding a job for an associate, and he was assured that the right people knew of the potential employee.   

The emails are not devastating, but they are damaging as Clinton struggles to boost her trustworthiness with voters. And such messages will continue to surface until the election. The State Department is being forced to release more documents as a result of government investigations and lawsuits like the one filed by Judicial Watch.

Read more at: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-clinton-email-overshadow-20160811-snap-story.html

Hillary Clinton speaks Thursday in Warren, Mich., where she took on Donald Trump's economic agenda and what she called "outlandish Trumpian ideas." (Mandi Wright / Detroit Free Press)