New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd continued her nearly 23-year long crusade against Hillary Clinton with a column accusing her of “compromis[ing] the president” and “willfully put[ting] herself above the rules.” 

Dowd wrote a July 9 column, titled “The Clinton Contamination,” admonishing Clinton after FBI Director James Comey called her private email server “extremely careless” but recommended no charges for criminal conduct -- the Justice Department accepted those recommendations. In her column, Dowd called Clinton’s actions “arrogant” and “selfish” and said she “contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington -- Barack Obama, James Comey, and Loretta Lynch,” continuing that “Hillary’s goo got on Obama.” Dowd concluded that “the Clintons work hard but don’t play by the rules.” Dowd lamented that “the email scandal” had supposedly “clouded the futures” of some of the most trusted Clinton aides, and derisively referred to former President Bill Clinton as “the Arkansas devil.”

A Media Matters analysis of Dowd’s columns found that 72 percent of her work between November 1993 and June 2014 included negative tropes against the Clintons, including regularly portraying Hillary Clinton as an unlikeable, power-hungry phony. In the year following, all 17 of Dowd’s columns with significant mentions of Clinton were negative. Dowd regularly relies on sexist tropes to describe Clinton, including that she is a “granny” who “can’t figure out how to campaign as a woman” and suggesting she “should have run as a man” during the 2016 election. Hypocritically, Dowd has also accused her of “cry[ing] sexism too often.” 

Even Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, mocked Dowd’s column, tweeting, “Congratulations! This is the 7,673rd time Maureen Dowd has written this column! What a gig!”

Congratulations! This is the 7,673rd time Maureen Dowd has written this column! What a gig! https://t.co/9m21vbEtOi

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) July 9, 2016