Campaign 2016 Update: Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account. 

I thought it was a joke. This is the best the Republicans can do? Their moment in the sunshine, the focus on America’s problems, local Republicans riven by fear that they could end up with Mitt Romney... But how could they resist? 

Shock. Horror. And then she saved them all and made them available for archival review. 

No evidence of tampering of any kind. Clinton has called on the State Department to release all of the records after assuring that they don’t impinge on our national security. She smartly jumped up and immediately agreed to their release (avoiding the common mistake of denials based on incomplete information).

In other words, what we have here, as of now, is not a political conspiracy or a trail of corruption, but a mistake by one or more lawyers charged with working with IT on a project that led to all of the documents being preserved and retained, but not all of them necessarily previously available for other document requests. 

As for the mistake part, it can’t be easy to say no to one of the aides of the secretary. You want a separate server? We’ll get you one. That’s how most of us would respond. There just aren’t that many people with the guts to say “no” to power, especially if the issue hasn’t been fully litigated. 

Colin Powell engaged in diplomacy over his private email, Democrats point out. But the rules were different then, Republicans will counter. But then there is the “letter and the spirit,” which is where the Democrats are mounting their defense. And the law clearly used to allow such commingling, as it were. Whether the revisions now apply to all officeholders is an issue yet to be adjudicated. 

So now we can adjudicate that. And if they are so inclined, Republicans can outdo themselves barraging sweating young lawyers as to why they didn’t do more research into this whole fight about by whom and how the Clinton server was configured and who was associated with it, and in doing so fill the air with something that sounds like news but isn’t. But does anybody really care?

The New York Times deserves credit for breaking a legitimate story. The challenge is to keep it in proportion. 

This is just my anecdotal sense, but very few people outside the Beltway want to talk about politics right now. There is energy behind Hillary and pretty much out-and-out lethargy as to the rest. When I ask, someone points to all the headlines about the servers. Why indeed?

I used to avoid even looking at stories like these on the grounds that you shouldn’t reward bad behavior. But who can resist?