Hacktacular! EMAILS Edition

Speaking of Amber Phillips, rarely have the Clinton Rules been encapsulated more perfectly than by this post.

To be Scrupulously Fair, Phillips was in something of a tough spot. Mike Pence’s use of a private email account that actually was hacked reveals what was blindingly obvious all along: although it dominated campaign coverage in 2016, the story of Hillary Clinton’s EMAILS! was a trivial psuedoscandal involving behavior nobody would care about at all if it didn’t involve Hillary Clinton. Only admitting this at Chris Cillizza’s Cavalcade of EMAILS! would effectively be saying that the boss has devoted countless hours to pursuing a story of no substantive significance that, oh yes, put Donald Trump in the White House. So instead she has to invent differences between Clinton and Pence:

But: It’s legal in Indiana to use a private email account for work. In fact, you could argue Pence may have needed a private account: It’s illegal in Indiana for a government official to use her or his official account for political business.

In the State Department, it’s not straight-up illegal to use a private account, but government employees are urged to use their work-related accounts for both security and transparency sake. (The regulations were shifting while Clinton was secretary of state, but the general gist is that official emails were supposed to be archived or easily accessible.)

So, to summarize, it was legal when Mike Pence used a private email account, and it was legal when Hillary Clinton did it. Best practices would encourage government employees to be transparent, but again this applies to both parties. However, the situations are totally different because Mike Pence is judged by the standard of “legality,” while Hillary Clinton is judged by the standard of “straight-up legality.” I have no idea what this means, but I assume it has something to do with “extreme carelessness.”

This one might be even better:

Similarity No. 3: Both their accounts were vulnerable to hacking

But: The FBI says it’s possible — but not proven — Clinton’s emails were hacked, especially when she used her account “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.”

Pence’s account was actually hacked. In early 2016, hackers sent out a phishing email to his contacts claiming he and his wife were stranded in the Philippines, were attacked and robbed on their way back to their hotel and desperately needed money. Security experts told the Indianapolis Star it did not seem to be a hack specifically targeted at Pence, but they added that does not make a hack of a top government official’s email account any less “concerning.”

Mike Pence’s private email account was hacked. There is no evidence Clinton’s was. But Both Sides Do It because James Comey engaged in completely unfounded speculation that Clinton’s emails were hacked, and if anything gets thighs rubbed raw at the Fix it’s James Comey engaging in unfounded speculation about Hillary Clinton.

Speaking of which!

Also: The FBI felt there was enough in Clinton’s email account to launch a criminal investigation into her treatment of classified information. (Of course, the result of that investigation was that they decided not to prosecute her for any kind of crime.)

There is absolutely no investigation related to Pence, which brings us back to the original reason these two situations are fundamentally different: Using a private account if you’re the governor of Indiana, where it’s legal to do so and you’re ostensibly dealing with much less-sensitive information, is much different than using a private email account exclusively to do work as secretary of state,who has access to many if not most of the nation’s top secrets.

Republicans led by straight-shooting man of impeccable nonpartisan integritude James Comey engaged in investigations of Hillary Clinton and not Mike Pence, which proves that what Clinton did was much worse, and the fact that these investigations of Clinton turned up no evidence of a crime is central to this point. This is how your anti-Clinton propaganda sausage gets made, ladies and gentlemen.