Why would Cheryl Mills feel the need to 'clean up' something that she didn’t know was illegal?

When Cheryl Mills, a top Hillary Clinton functionary, heard that President Barack Obama told CBS News he’d only learned about her boss’ illegal server from media reports, she was concerned. “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov,” Mills reportedly wrote in newly leaked emails.

There are three choices here: Mills needed to clean up the president’s lie or Hillary’s deception or both. Why, after all, would this supposedly innocuous comment from Obama spark panic among Hillary’s closest advisers? Why would Mills feel the need “clean up” a situation she purportedly didn’t think was illegal? Who is “we?” And what did the email’s recipient, John Podesta, who had only a few weeks earlier been working for Obama, know about the president’s familiarity with the illegal server?

Moreover, FBI Director James Comey, who blessed Mills’ immunity deal before even cracking open her laptop, assured Americans during congressional testimony that Mills was cooperating with the investigation. Was she?

In the FBI’s summary statement, Mills alleged she didn’t know anything about Hillary’s email server until after the secretary of State’s tenure was over. In leaked emails we learned that this was untrue. Now we have emails in which Mills explicitly discusses concealing illegal activity. Did she inform the FBI about her attempts to “clean up” this mess? Did officials ask her about his relationship. If so, why was she given immunity?

Why wouldn’t this considered obstruction of justice? One of the charges Scooter Libby was convicted of was making false statements when interviewed by federal agents and the media. (At the time a Deputy Attorney General James Comey named a special counsel to investigate the Plame affair. The same man is now handing out free passes to Hillary’s entire inner circle.) Either Mills wasn’t telling the truth or the FBI didn’t believe it was important to ask.

It is also apparent that the pseudonym-using Obama almost surely lied when claiming he knew nothing about Clinton’s private communication system until hearing about in news reports. But we knew this already. Though the White House later tried to walk back the president’s comments, it’s plausible that Obama’s presence here is one the reasons the FBI tanked the investigation in the first place.

Because I’m unsure how any reasonable person could still believe Comey didn’t quash the investigation. The FBI director rewrote the law to include an intent element rather than merely gross negligence and then immunized anyone who could prove Hillary’s objectives. One would have to suspend all disbelief to accept that Hillary didn’t intend to use her unsecured, hidden communications infrastructure to send 110 emails containing clearly marked classified information. Thirty-six of these emails contained secret information. Eight of those email chains contained “top secret” information.

Even if you believe she hadn’t knowingly acted in a reckless fashion, once her private system was discovered (though neither she nor any of the others who saw the private email address volunteered this information), she lied to the American people, and her staff worked to destroy and hide the evidence.

Now, I remember when suggesting Hillary or her people had plotted to hide illegality was considered a conspiracy theory. Then again, everything is a conspiracy theory when it comes to the Clintons, until someone provides indisputable evidence of wrongdoing. Then we move to the “Who cares, it’s not a big deal” phase of the debate, before finally landing on the “Look over here at what Donald Trump was doing in the ’80s” phase.

The thing is: once Trump is gone all of this will still be corruption.