So now a Republican-appointed FBI director says that whatever happened with Hillary Clinton’s email, it doesn’t rise to the level of prosecutable offense. Naturally people are melting down, because this has been the essential Clinton problem since 1993: the GOP, still unable to come to terms with the fact they lost that election, believe that any means are legitimate to undo its results. The result is tantamount to being tailed by a state trooper 12 hours straight, and upon finding a pretext for pulling you over, being served with a death warrant.
To anyone who knows jack shit about government IT, this is not surprising in the least. Government IT is a debacle, largely because we must never waste a penny of taxpayer money and we must spare no expense to make sure we never waste a penny of taxpayer money. No for-profit business would ever endure the level of sloth, redundancy and triple-checking that goes into IT at the federal level, where in 2007 I was issued a laptop that Apple discontinued in 2003 and a discussion was mooted about making sure everyone was up to OS X 10.3 just as Apple released 10.5.
Everyone in high-ranking government work pursues some kind of workaround, because relying on government IT to get things done is asking for trouble. I abandoned that POS G4 TiBook within a week and was using a personal MacBook for most of the next two years (okay, it was a long-term loan from my old Apple buddies, but it wasn’t NASA’s for sure). I had my own install of Apple Remote Desktop because using the one copy installed on an XServe in one basement was excruciating. Setting up an imaging solution of the sort I’d used before was a non-starter because there was a six-page setup checklist for new Macs which included enabling the root account (in defiance of pretty much every security standard in the private sector) and setting up an Administrator account with no administrator privileges.
So on that basis, it makes perfect sense that Hills had her own setup. Was it against the rules? Almost certainly. Was it against the law? Possibly. Was it in any way out of the ordinary for similarly-positioned government employees? Not at all, given that all her predecessors in the Internet era either did the same thing themselves or merely eschewed the use of email altogether.
But this is the problem: we have chased that car so many times with the Clintons. Every single nothingburger adds up to the same thing: there’s no there there, but it feeds the conservative instinct that there MUST be an impeachment pony somewhere under that 500 foot pile of horseshit, while simultaneously fueling the instinct of the Clinton-defenders that any suggestion of wrongdoing is yet another travel office-Whitewater-god knows what snipe hunt rather than a possible sign of malfeasance. That’s almost certainly how we got to this point; in fact I am prepared to bet that paranoid control of her own email system in the face of doubters and persons of malicious intent was almost certainly why HRC got a private setup in the first place.
And yet, because it’s Hillary Clinton, we are going to go another fifteen rounds on this while shrugging off the fact that Donald Trump is literally retweeting anti-Semitic memes someone found on Reddit or some such.
Maybe Britain will be cheap enough to escape to.