The Clinton E-Mail Story Is Still Nothing

And until she's indicted, like say, Gov. Rick Perry, it's a nothingburger and I'll keep pressing that fact.

F.B.I. agents investigating Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email server are seeking to determine who at the State Department passed highly classified information from secure networks to Mrs. Clinton’s personal account, according to law enforcement and diplomatic officials and others briefed on the investigation.

To track how the information flowed, agents will try to gain access to the email accounts of many State Department officials who worked there while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the officials said. State Department employees apparently circulated the emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011, and some were ultimately forwarded to Mrs. Clinton.

They were not marked as classified, the State Department has said, and it is unclear whether its employees knew the origin of the information.

So somebody clearly did not handle sensitive information correctly.  That somebody is not Hillary Clinton.

Law enforcement officials have said that Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, is not a target of the investigation, and she has said there is no evidence that her account was hacked. There has also been no evidence that she broke the law, and many specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in her account was probably of marginal consequence.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said in a statement on Friday that she “took the handling of classified information very seriously.”

“She always received classified materials in secure settings, either by phone, videoconference, on paper or in person,” said the spokesman, Nick Merrill. “If, however, some material unknowingly ended up somewhere on the State Department’s unclassified email system, we want to continue to be as helpful as possible in getting to the bottom of that.”

But of course, it's not like the media players in this game have a 20 year history of witch hunts against the Clintons or anything.  John Cole notes Ron Fournier (of all people) nailed this earlier this week:

Furthermore, a thorough autopsy of the deleted email might lead to details about other embarrassing topics, such as Benghazi (a GOP fetish), or the intersection of Clinton Foundation donors and State Department business (“Follow the money,” a Democrat close to Clinton told me in March). Though this is pure speculation, her closest allies worry about what might be found. 

That's the whole point of this, to stoke a detailed fishing expedition to look through her email and find some sort of "smoking gun" that ends her presidential run.

That's the entire ballgame, and never forget it for a second.