Washington journalists used to live for days as rich in irony as this one. Now it's just a run of the mill Tuesday. It's amazing what happens whenever one or both of the Clintons is involved. They have a kind of Nixonian quality about them, one combining a lust for power with a confidence the rules as they are generally understood don't apply to them. Say what you want, they've made it work.

FBI Director James Comey did not let Hillary Clinton get away unscathed during a press conference in which he announced he had concluded "no reasonable prosecutor" would find the grounds to bring an indictment against her for mishandling classified information sent over several unsecured, private e-mail servers using numerous electronic devices. She did not intend to break the law and would not be prosecuted even if the evidence showed she did – a precedent coming about three days too late for a U.S. Navy seaman who pleaded guilty Friday to using his cellphone to take pictures inside restricted areas of a nuclear submarine and keeping them, in violation of the rules for handling classified materials. Petty Officer First Class Kristian Saucier could go to prison for more than six years according to news reports, while Clinton's next stop appears to be the White House.

But wait, as they used to say in the late night television spots, there's more. At the same time Clinton was receiving what her supporters will no doubt eventually morph into an exoneration, her husband's private June 27 meeting at a Phoenix airport aboard a private plane with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch was made the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request by Cause of Action Institute, a good government group run by a former federal judge.

Editorial Cartoons on Hillary Clinton View All 258 Images

The group wants all records, transcripts or recordings of the meeting, as well as the attorney general's schedule for June 26-28, 2016, "including but not limited to pre- and post-meeting email which concern the meeting in any way" because whatever the two were doing – and we doubt seriously she was giving him a haircut – the fact that the two met in what can only be described as suspicious circumstances "raises serious concerns about impartiality at the Department of Justice."

What they'll get may depend on a D.C. Circuit court ruling issued Tuesday while all eyes were elsewhere that agency records, including "departmental emails on an account in another domain," must be searched or produced in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

The ruling comes in a case brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute against the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy over its director's use of non-official email accounts for work-related emails. The D.C. Circuit overturned a district court ruling, and remanded that case back to the district court for further proceedings. It's not too hard to see how the issues in this case might also apply to inquiries about Clinton's emails, which no one should think for a second have come to an end.

The FBI says it found 113 classified emails that were mishandled. Comey's acknowledgment that Clinton was "extremely careless" in her handling of sensitive, classified material could be read as negligence, which just happens to be the threshold for bringing an indictment under the Espionage Act and other federal statutes dealing with how information is handled. That he chose not to move forward might have been an act of courage or of cowardice. We cannot judge at this time. It is clear, though, that whatever standard applied to the former secretary would also have to be applied to anyone who sent or received such emails from her.

Think of the implications. The entire top ranks of the Democratic Party – donors, policymakers, senior diplomats, even a former president – could be exposed as accessories in her mishandling of documents more people have seen than were ever meant to. It's as if the Nixon White House had email instead of a taping system – which, if it had, would probably have made it quite easy to determine what the president knew and when he knew it.

The most troubling thing, which will ultimately be left to the voters to work out for themselves, is how she and her minions lied to the public at just about every turn. She wanted everything on one device. There were no private servers. There were private servers but no classified materials were sent through them. There are as many excuses and denials as there are emails – some of which have probably been destroyed, contrary to the provisions of federal record-keeping acts that are in place just to prevent things like this from ever happening.