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The Hilary email server thing is really a special case that usually isn't well explained...
She wanted a separate email system so:
She and Huma could co-mingle Secretary of State business and Clinton Foundation business. Foreign governments were making requests about official business to the clintonemail.com address, and getting donation requests for the Clinton Foundation from the same email address. There was a pretty strong subtext there.
Keeping the emails off of government servers kept them out of FOIA requests.
Now what makes it a big scandal is that the bureaucrats in DC were helping her. She was powerful and popular in DC. No one else could have pulled it off.
The email server was discovered when Judicial Watch noticed that they weren't seeing any emails from Hilary's account in their FOIA requests about Benghazi.
The staff in charge of FOIA requests knew all about the separate email server and argued that those records weren't in their possession so they couldn't search them. But responding to the request with "no relevant records found" is dishonest given that they knew they should have had the records.
It came out that it wasn't secured properly and foreign intelligence services were likely reading classified emails there. That defeated the "what's the harm" excuse.
It's not the worst scandal that's ever happened, but it does stand out as unique. Hilary had been so powerful in DC for so long that she knew how to flout the rules. There really isn't anyone else who could have done something similar.
I agree that in general high level officials get sloppy with classified information and do things that an ultra aggressive DOJ could prosecute them for. It seems inevitable given the amount of sensitive information they deal with and the fact it's impossible to live in a SCIF.
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The Hillary scandal is an order of magnitude worse than Trump/Biden because of the intent behind what she was doing. The purpose was to evade oversight both from the public and congress. And she systematically compromised national security for that purpose (and most likely corruption/graft).
Yes. She can't plead ignorance, because she took willful action to subvert the default way of doing things, when the easy ignorant path is to just accept the standard government email accounts which are already set-up for compliance with discovery regulations. Sort of like how putting classified documents in an envelope marked "Personal" (or stuffed in your socks, like Sandy Berger) shows intent to subvert.
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