Drum: Clinton E-mail Scandal was BS

Kevin Drum goes through a detailed timeline of the Clinton e-mail scandal and concludes it was overblown bullsh*t on Mother Jones.

As near as I can tell, Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong. Period. No shilly shallying, no caveats. It's true that the optics were sometimes bad, and the whole affair showed off Clinton's political instincts at their worst. But that's it. Both legally and ethically, she did nothing wrong. And liberals should have been willing to say so.

This is the meat of the whole affair. The rest is chaff. Did Clinton violate the Federal Records Act by holding her email on a private server? Was she trying to evade FOIA requests? Did she lie about wanting to use one email device? Did she violate agency regulations because she used an outside mail account for all her communications, rather than just part of them, as others have routinely done? Etc. etc. We can argue about this stuff forever and we'll never know the answer. If you hate Clinton, you'll insist that these are major felonies that should have landed her in a Supermax for life. But if you don't hate Clinton in the first place, none of these will strike you as anything more than minor infractions at best and ungrounded speculation at worst. Plus there's this: no one ever came close to investigating any of this, let alone trying to bring charges. Among the folks who know the most about these things, there was never so much as a hint that there was anything illegal among all the sensational accusations.³