And the fact that the State Department's emails were hacked? How does that figure in to this judgment that Clinton's server was somehow riskier?
For me, this argument goes to the notion that there is very little substance to the defense of Clinton's use of a private email server.
Obviously Clinton is responsible for the security of her own email server. Security problems with her server are entirely on her. Did she vet the people that had access to her server? Did she ensure they had security clearances in the likely event that there would be sensitive and classified data in the emails even if by accident? Did she employ security for her and her staff's emails that met or exceeded State Department standards? etc. The responsibility for the security of the State Department's email servers is more diffuse, but if Clinton actually decided to use a private email server because she thought the State Department email server was insecure, then her judgment and sense of job responsibility is far worse than I believe is the case. She was in charge of the State Department. The action required if she believed the State Department email server and practices were insecure was to take actions to fix that.
This analogy has been provided before (It is hard to be all that original in a thread that is this long), but this defense of Clinton's actions is exactly analogous to the argument a bank robber might make if the bank burned down the day after he robbed it. He might say the money would have been lost anyway so he didn't commit a crime. How is this defense of Clinton any different than that?
And of course, this defense doesn't go at all to what was almost certainly Clinton's intent with the setting up of this server. She knowingly violated regulations, standard procedures and common sense to avoid making her emails subject to discovery through FOIA. Overall her effort with regard to this was not particularly well thought out and that is another hit against Clinton. With the Secretary of Defense appointment she was almost guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee. All she had to do was not do something stupid and get caught. She did something stupid, she wasn't particularly skillful at hiding it and she got caught. The country is now faced with a damn mess as a result. The Republicans are likely to nominate a candidate that would have close to zero chance of winning the general election. For good reason in my view, most of the electorate is not in sync with this band of anti-science, anti-gay, anti-choice, pro-war, race baiting (in Trump's case), government shutting down (in Cruz's case) zealots. And yet thanks to Clinton's malfeasance on this and perhaps to a degree her questionable actions with regard to her foundation and speaking fees, one of these guys might win.
ETA: Thanks to
TheL8Elvis for the Politico link. It seemed to make a pretty good case that Clinton might avoid indictment based on a what seemed like a credible review of precedents. If this is the case, and Clinton goes on to win the presidency, the hope for all* of us is this trip into stupid land by Clinton was anomalous and not representative of her in general.
ETA2: * All except people that are so deeply invested in Clinton hatred that they would rather see the country fail than succeed under a Clinton presidency. There's a pretty deeply invested group of Obama haters right now and the group of deeply invested Clinton haters will probably be larger.
