While the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton's secret server where she kept official emails out of the view of the authorities until her lawyers could scrub them, for some reason, agents never searched the Blackberries or other email devices belonging to her inner circle at the State Department.

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and his team received a crazy response when they asked FBI agents on the Hillary Clinton email investigation why not.

The agents' primary excuse was to point to "the culture of mishandling classified information at the State Department which made the quantity of potential sources of evidence particularly vast" (see page 153).

Put another way, the agents thought that they might find so much classified information on unauthorized servers and systems that they would become lost in the maze. Horowitz, in what can only be described as a generous admonition, counters by noting "that [this excuse] fails to acknowledge that the team was not required to take an all-or-nothing approach. For example, a middle ground existed where those devices belonging to Clinton’s three top aides - which the team determined accounted for approximately 68 percent of Clinton’s email exchanges - would have been reviewed, but devices belonging to other State Department employees would not."

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This suggestion by Horowitz seems rather, well, obvious.

From my perspective, by failing to investigate material held on the personal devices belonging to Clinton's senior leadership team and senior aides, the FBI failed in their duty to fully pursue realistic and feasible avenues of profitable investigation. Yes, it would have been utterly unfeasible to go through the devices of even senior-mid-ranking State Department officials. The bureau is rightly regarded as the world's finest law enforcement service, but it beggars belief that the case agents didn't even do a cursory search of those devices belonging to Clinton's inner circle.

The FBI has investigative tools to allow for a speedy download and keyword/form specific investigation of emails from a server. That basic step would perhaps have added a few days work to the investigation, but it may also have produced physical evidence to indicate prima facie criminal mishandling of classified material.

I suspect that many police officers around the world would be shocked by this failure. As will the intelligence services of China, Russia, France, and Israel who, based on their traditional espionage tradecraft and targeting, likely focused on Clinton's inner circle as a possible gold mine.