Fresh off a successful White House bid during which his running mate campaigned on the idea that his political opponent should be jailed for using a personal e-mail account to conduct official business, Vice President Mike Pence has some explaining to do. According to a report from the intrepid folks at The Indianapolis Star, while he was serving as Indiana's governor, Pence routinely used a personal e-mail account to conduct official business. The only thing less surprising than this cheerfully unapologetic hypocrisy is the fact that, in 2016, Mike Pence was still using an AOL e-mail address.

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Let's get a few things out of the way. Yes, it's alarming that some of these e-mails were deemed sensitive enough that they were withheld from the state's response to the Star's public-records request. No, it's not inherently unusual for politicians like Pence to use their private e-mail addresses for work on occasion. Yes, this revelation becomes even more troublesome when you remember that Pence's e-mail has been hacked before—last summer, when he spammed his contacts pleading with them to send him money to an account in the Philippines. No, Governor Pence probably would not have dealt with information as sensitive as that which came through Secretary Clinton's inbox. And so on and so forth. If you wish to spend this dreary Friday afternoon litigating their relative levels of culpability, rest assured that Twitter is amply stocked with people who stand ready and willing to do so.

Whichever egg gets the best of any one scintillating @-reply back-and-forth, though, does not matter. The revelation that Pence employed shoddy e-mail protocols of his own reinforces something that you probably already intuited, but that nonetheless bears repeating, just in case: Donald Trump's ceaseless, furious condemnations of Hillary Clinton's e-mail management was never about honesty, or national security, or best practices in information technology. It was a politically expedient lie, carefully crafted by a man well-versed in telling them, that was designed to take advantage of one of the most insidious lingering stereotypes in so-called polite society, which is the falsehood that women, deep down, are incapable of doing the tough jobs right—that it would simply be imprudent for a nation to entrust a lady with a role as important as president of the United States.

Trump, because he is never one for half-measures, chose to describe Clinton's conduct as purposeful and malicious while on the campaign trail. But really, establishing her intent wasn't necessary. As long as his "Lock her up" drum-beating activated the stereotype in voters' minds, planting just enough seeds of doubt about the potential consequences of making this careless, bumbling, technologically illiterate woman commander-in-chief, that was enough.

Here is what Pence had to say about what Clinton's e-mail mismanagement really means, which came in the same conversation in which he called her "the most dishonest candidate for president of the United States since Richard Nixon." (Mike Pence is not fond of half-measures, either.)

Hillary Clinton operated in such a way to keep her e-mails, and particularly her interactions, while Secretary of State, with the Clinton Foundation out of the public reach, out of public accountability.

And later:

She either knew or should've known that she was placing classified information in a way that exposed it to being hacked and being made available in the public domain, even to enemies of this country.

This was shameless, sexist bullshit at the time, but this week's news makes it hypocritical shameless, sexist bullshit, too. Donald Trump never cared about public accountability, and the shouty anti-Clinton conspiracy theories to which he diligently clung were never based on a sincerely-held belief that his opponent, if elected president, would engage in cybersecurity practices that would put American lives and interests at risk. The reason Mike Pence is a heartbeat away from the White House while Hillary Clinton is taking long walks in Chappaqua is because Donald Trump trussed up her frighteningly boring internal communications protocols as evidence of a fatal character flaw that disqualified her from being president. Her e-mails never mattered. It was the fact that they were hers, not his.

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